Talk:Caldera OpenLinux

Debian

Qwertyus - First edit I haven't agreed with. Can you explain a little as to why you consider this irrelevant? The Debian timeline is useful for comparison. Debian and Redhat were the two major alternative philosophies. Jbolden1517 11:38, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Because it's not a comparative history, it's a Debian history. The referenced page doesn't mention Caldera, and the article doesn't discuss Debian. Qwertyus 07:27, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

OK I would agree the phrasing is misleading. I'll change in the article. Tell me if you are OK with next version.

Style violation

Can I get a list of style violations? I'm sure there are some but I don't know what they are (other than citation style) jbolden1517^Talk 00:20, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Death of Caldera

Tim - Without the damned soul analogy the whole section makes no sense. You lose the conclusion you lose the analogy. How do you want to tidy that up? jbolden1517^Talk 14:11, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Note my version of a tidy up. jbolden1517^Talk 18:39, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

npov

I've added an npov tag, because of the "damned soul" analogy and because of the following sentences:

Windows networking support was terrible, the internet was dominated by UNIX based operating systems. The Unixes of the day were:

• Too hardware intensive
• Too large
• Charged too much in license fees

I'd like to know who said all this; if Novell did, I'd like a reference. Qwertyus 17:16, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

OK, fixed jbolden1517^Talk 16:08, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Darl McBride

The section seems higly POV, lots of accusations and claims about court results, while litigation is still pending. I'm not sure this section belongs on the OpenLinux page anyways...--Fxer 20:31, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

If you disagree then fix it / rephrase it. jbolden1517^Talk 20:52, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Just trying to have a discussion about it, no need for defensiveness, anything constructive is helpful on Wikipedia... No one else sees issues in an encyclopedia with statements like he made strong false accusations regarding Linux, SCO freely purjures itself in filing after filing and SCO aims for profitability over anything else? --Fxer 23:23, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Also, it may be worth merging this section into the Darl McBride article, and perhaps the SCO article, seems a little out of place on the OpenLinux article. --Fxer 23:34, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Well they've been caught lying via most mainstream press reports (that is WP:V). There doesn't have to be a conviction. As for profitability I prove the former CEO saying that (again WP:V). This section needs to be here because it ties OpenLinux to SCO. It acts as the bridge but yes another bridge would work just as well. I'll leave the banner assuming you can indicate a specific quote that does not rise to WP:V. jbolden1517^Talk 00:16, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

"Caldera had been willing to buck the open source community on issues like the GPL. SCO has argued that open source community in total is illegitimate [5]. Caldera in the end put marketing above engineering, marketing being a technique designed to mislead[citation needed]. SCO freely purjures itself in filing after filing [6]." The references cited do not provide the conclusions made in the article, and thus these statements appear to be based on original research. The allegations have to be backed up by a verifiable 3rd party source. Overall the entire section has too many problems with unverifiable statements, so the POV tag is going back up. BigE1977 14:59, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Caldera Thin Clients / Lineo confusion

The text on this page really mangles the history of Lineo.

I was there for two years, up to the very last round of layoffs.

A little correction on the history as i know it.

Caldera had acquired Digital Research - makers of DR-DOS - from Novell, way back in the day.

Ultimately the DOS business didn't really fit into the Caldera product line, so a separate company - Caldera Thin Clients - was sliced off of the main business.

This was not a department or subsidiary of Caldera in any way. Bryan Sparks led it, and many former Caldera employees worked there, but the two companies had no relationship with each-other excepting the fact that they were both beholden to The Canopy Group.

Canopy insisted that the two companies not compete with each other.

After a while, there was a business decision made to re-brand Caldera Thin Clients as an embedded linux provider and dissociate the company from the sinking ship that was Caldera - CTC was renamed Lineo.

Caldera and Lineo did not share information or services. Communication between the two companies was acrimonious at best.

Lineo employed several people who had been laid-off from Caldera, and feelings toward Caldera were less than friendly. As Caldera stock fell further and further, there was generally a feeling of mirthful schadenfreude toward Caldera.

I say this to stress the point that Lineo was not a Caldera marketing tool. These were completely separate companies, with some shared history and investors, who really didn't get along together at all.

Initially, Canopy had insisted that Lineo base it's linux offerings on Caldera OpenLinux, on the agreement that Caldera would provide Lineo with assistance where needed. After 18 months, Caldera had provided no assistance, and Lineo engineers were quite happy to use better distributions.

It is debatable whether Embedix was really the flagship product.

Lineo failed in large part because they lacked an actual flagship. There was a huge professional services group that wrote a lot of code and serviced a lot of customers, but the sales department consistently lowballed the contracts, and the PS group lost a lot of money. In the last days of Lineo, before it was acquired by Metrowerks, the CTO related to me that having gone over the existing PS contracts, he found that they had $55,000,000.00 worth of contracts waiting to be fulfilled, and maybe $4,000,000.00 worth of those contracts would be profitable, but they lacked the resources to fulfill more than a few hundred thousand worth.

I worked in the Target Wizard group. As far as product offerings were concerned, TW was the largest single effort in the Lindon office. Unfortunately, it solved a problem that nobody knew they had, and the total number of copies sold (not including bundles with Motorola products) could probably be counted on your fingers and toes. Maybe just your fingers.

It was written in Lindon UT, and although the Zentropix crew in the UK occasionally checked in half-baked, unusable components for it, it was not derived from the Zentropix SDK. I'm fairly certain that i never even heard anyone mention the Zentropix SDK.

It is notable, however, that DR-DOS was the only consistently profitable product that Lineo had to offer.

The article also overlooks the Moreton Bay Solutions quagmire with regard to Lineo, the group in Seattle that attempted to repackage TW for Windows, and the high-availablity group in France, but perhaps those would be best detailed on a separate page. I would go so far as to remove most of the Lineo information from this one, in fact.

What remains of Lineo in the US is a small division of Freescale (formerly Metrowerks), employing about 5 extremely talented kernel hackers, of the oldschool beard & suspenders persuasion. They rent office space in Canopy building IV.

It is noteworthy that Matt Harris - Lineo's legal council as of 1999 and later briefly COO and then CEO of Lineo - somehow became CEO of Metrowerks for a few years before Freescale split off from Motorola. Nobody is quite sure how or why this happened.

It is also worth pointing out that the Lindon office of Caldera was not directly involved in the OpenLinux product.

Caldera's original distribution - Caldera Network Desktop - did come out of utah. At some point, a decision was made that Caldera in the US should concentrate on "enterprise" offerings, though it was never really clear what those were.

The OpenLinux distribution was created and maintained by a german acquisition of Caldera (anybody know the name of that company?) and communication between Caldera in Utah and the german office was not good. The germans were uncooperative.

One former Caldera employee related to me that years ago, as a Caldera employee, he had found a bug in the OpenLinux distribution, created a patch, and mailed it to that module's maintainer in germany with an explanation of the problem.

Some months later, a new revision of COL was released, and was found to contain the same bug. He created a new patch, and emailed it to the appropriate party again.

Another revision of COL was released, and still contained the same bug. Another patch was sent.

As of the final version Caldera OpenLinux, 3.11, the bug was still present. The germans just didn't listen to anybody from Utah, and didn't care what anybody thought about their wretched distribution.

The german office of Caldera was also responsible for all OpenLinux support, and although their english was impeccable, their attitude toward customers bordered on hostility.

-- (unsigned) 2006-06-28T00:34:58‎ User:Ejorge

First off definitely start editing, just remember you'll need sources. The german company was Ralf Flaxa's company http://www.lst.de/. jbolden1517^Talk 23:36, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:ND1.jpg

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BetacommandBot (talk) 22:36, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Lineo-Logo.png

Image:Lineo-Logo.png is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to ensure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images lacking such an explanation can be deleted one week after being tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

BetacommandBot (talk) 23:54, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Penguin-Outline.gif

Image:Penguin-Outline.gif is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to ensure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images lacking such an explanation can be deleted one week after being tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

BetacommandBot (talk) 16:23, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

For readers the [ [ File:Penguin-Outline.png ] ] is the replacement image jbolden1517^Talk 03:15, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

text block

I pulled a text block from the article. I'm not sure it is correct. It was in the United Linux section which is too early (that section ends with Ransom Love still as CEO) and I think it mainly go in the copyright section. I'm keeping it here in full so that if someone wants to work on it they can. Below the line is the article jbolden1517^Talk 03:12, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

_______

In November 2002, the SCO Group released its last Linux version before the lawsuit turned most of the Open Source community against it. It was based on UnitedLinux 1.0, and was the successor to Caldera OpenLinux 3.1.1. The firm dubbed it "SCO Linux 4.0," and it included IBM's JFS journaling file system for the first time. The company raised the price from $99 in Caldera OpenLinux 3.1 to $600 effectively killing any chances for it to be price competitive with SCO Unix. The CD images for SCO Linux 4.0 which was initially made available for download to developers was later pulled from its public ftp site.

What Improvements Does This Article Need?

This article is very interesting but not very good as a quick reference. This talk page hasn't been touched by a human since 2007, and even then only once...

• Anonymous person 75.62.233.21, definitely post that boot screen logo! If it violates fair use rationale in some way (probably from being of too high a resolution?) then I'm sure someone else can fix it. I know, that sounds irresponsible but seriously, Be Bold. I think that it could possibly help to convey the "feel" of the operating system and the level of sophistication of bootloaders and such of the day. Other operating system distributions have a large screenshot of the desktop in the template - sometimes several.

I agree anon. Also if you want screen shots [1], [2] low res, [3], COAS!!!,

• Dates in this article are in short supply. When exactly did the system come about? This is unclear and it's one of the first pieces of information I'd look for.

Can you be a little more specific about which dates? The article started more as an essay of evolution. What are you looking for date wise, or do you just mean scatter dates through the article or...? jbolden1517^Talk 03:57, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

• Many other distributions, defunct and otherwise, have templates near the top of the page giving a quick overview of things like when it was last released, what state the codebase is in and when it first emerged. I think that this article could benefit from that. Not everyone looking at SCO/Unix is interested solely in lawsuits and namedropping, some of us are actually also interested in the history of Unix as a computer operating system.

Well yeah. That's why I started the article. I couldn't believe that wikipedia didn't have an article on Caldera which was one of the most innovative distributions. The early versions emphasized Caldera's important historical role:

The analogous point can be made of Caldera OpenLinux, OpenLinux was not a Microsoft killer, but it showed the Linux community what would be required to create a mainstream desktop OS out of the Linux kernel. In many ways the last 10 years of desktop progress has been to successfully implement what Caldera was attempting to do with the tools they had available. Their technique for this was to utilize commercial software to fill in the largest gaps. This made their product a "value add" and thus they could charge for it, and at the same time it made them the most advanced distribution available.

You may want to look at an earlier version. See diff for when a lot of changes happened. The older version had a lot more of the details. jbolden1517^Talk 03:57, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

• The article claims that "IBM was not the company involved with the company most directly involved is the company that later became the SCO group." ... What the hell? Maybe it's because it's 3AM, but I don't understand this particular sentence. Is this detail critical to understanding the article? SneakyWho am i (talk) 14:05, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

What happened here is someone took a list and just removed the formatting. That were originally separate bullet points became a single sentence which makes no sense. I've fixed. jbolden1517^Talk 03:23, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

boot screen image

I have an openlinux 1.2 boot screen image with caldera logo would you want to post it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.62.233.21 (talk) 22:53, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Do it! It will help to illustrate the operating system, and it will be on a par with other articles which go so far as to show high resolution shots of even desktops (even Windows articles have this). If it violates copyright in some way, it's a computer screenshot - and can therefore be scaled down to a more sensible size. I think that if you explain the fair use rationale there will be no problem at all, it's easy. SneakyWho am i (talk) 14:05, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Company name confusion

This articles seriously mixes up the various Caldera companies and their products (and sometimes even the timeline). It is important to distinguish between Caldera, Caldera Systems / Caldera International / SCO, and Caldera Thin Clients / Lineo / Embedix.

OpenLinux was originally a Caldera product, which was, after the split-up, continued to be maintained by Caldera Systems.

Caldera Thin Clients and Lineo (the successor of Caldera Thin Clients) had nothing to do with OpenLinux (except for that they licensed it for their Embedix, like Caldera Systems licensed DR-DOS to be included in their OpenLinux distribution).

At present the article has whole chapters discussing Caldera Thin Clients and Lineo, which do not belong into here at all. This should be moved to the Lineo article or incorporated into the corresponding chapter at Caldera (company). --Matthiaspaul (talk) 23:12, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

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Proposal to move some material out of here to the Caldera (company) article

See Talk:Caldera (company)#Proposal to move some material from Caldera OpenLinux and SCO Group articles to here for proposal and any discussion. Wasted Time R (talk) 23:24, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

Article basically just needs blanking

This article is appalling. Most of the content is not relevant to the subject, and a great deal is simply puffery talking about various people and organisations around Caldera Linux, other (barely relevant) products and occasionally criticism of other people, none of which is relevant to the article subject.

Quite seriously, you could come to this article about Caldera OpenLinux and learn absolutely nothing about Caldera OpenLinux. This article needs nuking and rewriting entirely, there is nothing salvageable here. I tried removing everything not relevant and the Wikipedia spam filter wouldn't let me, since it meant removing literally all but two lines of the article, and apparently I need to come here and achieve consensus first... BloodNinjasPinwheel (talk) 07:29, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

OK, I've done it. I'm amazed this article stuck around in the form it did since 2008(!!!!!); it was completely unencyclopedic, the sources that were included were irrelevant, what sources were included that looked relevant actually weren't, and the whole article was basically written to talk about how great everyone involved with Caldera was and how revolutionary it was and all the amazing things it included, without providing any real sources for that. There has been a hatnote on top saying this for five years and nobody fixed it until now, presumably because (as I discovered) again any attempt to fix it looks like vandalism. I will try and research and add actual sources and things describing this operating system (noting that it has been dead for twenty years so sources are fairly thin on the ground) at some point today.

This is unfortunately complicated by the fact that because of this crap-tier article staying around for this long, pretty much all the sources I've been able to find on a cursory search crib from its irrelevant ramblings. Great stuff. BloodNinjasPinwheel (talk) 07:51, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

Blanking and redirecting was disruptive, as when the article was restored, this made me spend considerable time reverting some ~140 double-redirect bot edits. Right, creating so many redirects was the original cause of disruption. – wbm1058 (talk) 19:02, 16 September 2024 (UTC)