Caldera Gets Mucho Dolares & Case Against MS Continues

The PR people at Caldera Systems e-mailed me with the news that they've gotten some major outside investment. The press has got more news, but the company's getting $30 million dollars from SCO, Sun, Citrix, Novell, Egan-Managed Capital and Chicago Venture Partners. In other news, their case against Microsoft continues to progress.It should be noted that while they have similar names, and are owned by the same man, Caldera (lawsuit company) and Caldera Systems are separate companies - thanks to all those who pointed out my mistake.

Comments

You Can Tell Slashdot Is Becoming Popular When...

[n3rd]

Please forgive this slightly offtopic comment, but I find it amusing that now companies are submitting stories and information directly to Slashdot, rather than waiting for readers to submit them after the mainstream media has reported them.

How often does Slashdot recieve stories directly from companies and orginizations now-a-days? Could one of the Slashdot employees answer this?

Good news or bad?

[WombatControl]

It's nice to see that Caldera is getting some cash, I've used their distro from time to time, and while it isn't as popular as Red Hat, it isn't bad either. Hopefully this cash infusion will be used for the creation of quality software rather than marketing or executive retreats.

Still, this does also vaguely bother me. When I began using Linux is was about freedom and quality software. Now, Linux brings to mind two things: money and litigation. Yes, it's great that VCs everywhere are seeing Linux as The Next Hot Thing (tm) - but is that necessarily a good thing in the long run?

I do suppose that it was inevitable that Linux would become commercialized, just as the net has. Still, there are times when I think the sense of real community is diminishing. Everyone and their dog is jumping on the Linux bandwagon, but they don't seem to really understand it. (LinuxOne, the fights with Corel, etc...)

So, to actually stay somewhat on topic: I have a suggestion for Caldera. Now that they've got a few extra dollars laying around, they should use that on writing good software. Forget the marketing, forget public relations and Just Code It. When people see companies like RedHat or Corel seemingly more interesting in marketing than in software development (although this is perception, and not neccesarily the truth) it would be a breath of fresh air to remember what Linux was designed around: solid, open code.

Caldera's suit not that weak

[bhurt]

The article makes it sound like Caldera/DR-DOS said "Hey, we lost- let's sue!" Some things on Caldera's side:

1) Per-processor licensing. Caldera can prove that Microsoft used pressure that no one else could have brought to bear (i.e. monopoly-based pressure) on to the OEMs to prevent DR-DOS from being preinstalled. Microsoft's relationship with (and coercion of) the OEMs is discussed in depth in Judge Jackson's FOF. Caldera can use all of that and more.

2) The christmas beta. If Microsoft hadn't encrypted that code to make it harder to find and determine how it worked, they might have been able to claim it was just a Beta bug. But the _premeditated_ attempt to hide what they were doing says that they knew they were wrong.

Microsoft's defense is "Yeah, we committed a crime- but it can't be undone and it was aeons ago in computer years, so who cares?" Bleh.

Brian

Re:"Opposed to Microsoft" is not a business plan.

[platypus]

No customer saw that dialog in any shipping copy of windows.

But many customers (like me) couldn't get windows to install on top of dr-dos, strange coincidence...
Add to that the fact the windows was the _only_ software incompatible to dr-dos.

The lawsuit is now settled!

[tilly]

See the press release.

Ben