Caldera, Inc. was a Canopy-funded software company founded in October 1994[1] and incorporated on 25 January 1995[2] by former Novell employees Bryan Wayne Sparks, Ransom H. Love and others to develop the Caldera Network Desktop (CND) and later create a Linux distribution named OpenLinux (COL).

[7][8] The deal consisted of a direct payment of US$400000 as well as percentual royalties for any revenues derived from DR-DOS to Novell.

[10] This lawsuit related to Caldera's claims of monopolization, illegal tying, exclusive dealing, and tortious interference by Microsoft.

An example was that certain beta versions of Windows 3.1 produced technically groundless "non-fatal" fake error messages when installing and running them on DR DOS 6.0 due to a check known as AARD code in order to create fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) and destroy DR DOS' reputation.

Caldera later demonstrated that it would have been beneficial for DOS and Windows users to have a choice between MS-DOS and DR-DOS feature-wise, and that it was technically possible to run Windows 4 on DR-DOS 7 simply by faking some new, unnecessarily complex but functionally non-essential internal interfaces through WinGlue.

[6][29] On 1 June 1998, Caldera, Inc. opened a sales office for its DOS-based products in Taipei, Taiwan, run by Irrana and Henry Huang.

On 7 January 2000, immediately after the completion of the pre-trial deposition stage (where the parties list the evidence they intend to present), Microsoft settled out-of-court for an undisclosed sum,[34][35] which in 2009 was revealed to be US$280000000.

However, at a time when technology IPOs were attracting extremely high valuations, Caldera Systems's performance was generally perceived as a disappointment.

Originally located in Orem[33] and later in Lindon, it was meant to become the US-based "parent" company for Caldera UK Ltd.

[47][48][49] In April 1999, Caldera Thin Clients released the no longer needed sources to GEM and ViewMAX under the GNU General Public License (GPL).