Talk:Caldera OpenLinux

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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.

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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.

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)