Caldera Inc really believes there is money to be made from the Linux shareware Unixalike, and has bought a seat at the Open Group table, bringing key Linux technologies and people from the UK and Germany to help it achieve full Unix 95 branding for its Caldera Open Linux. The Provo, Utah-based company, backed by former Novell Inc boss Ray Noorda, has tapped Lasermoon Ltd, of Wickham, Hampshire for Linux technology and engineers – although not for a stake in Lasermoon itself – including Lasermoon co- founder Ian Nandhra, who is now Caldera’s director of product certification. Caldera has also tapped the Unix systems and Linux engineers from Linux Support Team of Erlangen, Germany. They will integrate Lasermoon’s stuff with Caldera’s exist ing operating system, additional Spec 1170 Unix application programming interfaces and their own Linux 2.2 offering. The first Posix 1 version of Caldera Open Linux will be out next quarter. It will be XPG4 Base 95-compliant and will get full Unix 9 5 branding sometime in 1997 – the company declined to narrow it down further than that. When each stage is completed, the company will put the code up on ftp.caldera.com for free downloading and use, but obviously other companies will not get the Unix 95 badge automatically. As well as the seat on the Open Group, Lasermoon had Open Group test suites that Caldera needed. Lasermoon will continue to do Linux development and is now also a Caldera distributor. Caldera has a couple of products at the moment, the Caldera Network Desktop environment for publishing on the Internet and intranets and the Internet Office suite, including implementations for WordPerfect and CorelDraw. It will shortly ship the Caldera Solutions compact disk containing all the applications it and its independent software vendors have written for Linux, in an encrypted form, which can be unlocked with the FlexLM license manager key that Caldera and its partners have licensed from Globetrotter Inc. The company has also licensed Sun Microsystems Inc’s Wabi Windows-on-Unix application programming interface to include in future applications. The firm will also incorporate the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol into the product line this autumn for directory services over the Internet. Caldera is committed to giving a significant percentage of its revenues to the Linux development community to further encourage its spread, including buying equipment. As Nandhra put it, Caldera’s is the biggest single investment that probably ever will be made in Linux. It really is make-or-break time.
