In August 2000, Caldera Systems announced the purchase of Unix technology and services from the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO).

Under severe financial pressure, in June 2002 Love was replaced as CEO by Darl McBride, who soon adopted the corporate name The SCO Group and took that entity in a completely different business direction.

[2] Caldera, Inc., based in Utah, was founded in 1994 by Bryan Wayne Sparks and Ransom H. Love, receiving start-up funding from Ray Noorda's Canopy Group.

[17] Besides Red Hat and Caldera, other well-known companies selling Linux distributions included SuSE, Turbolinux, and Mandrake Soft.

Red Hat CEO Bob Young said in 1999, "One where you might see a problem is Caldera, because they see part of their value added in proprietary tools they have licensed from third parties."

In response, a Caldera Systems executive expressed the company's philosophy: "We have produced a product that combines the best of open-source and commercial packages; we are doing Linux for business.

"[18] Caldera OpenLinux was also available on a retail basis, in the form of a CD-ROM for installing Linux on an IBM PC compatible machine that sold for US$49.

[31] The company was re-elected to its seat on the Executive Committee after it became Caldera International, and represented Java usage on SCO Unix platforms as well.

[41] Love also said that the timing between the funding round, work for which had begun six months earlier, and the IPO announcement was "unfortunate, and completely coincidental".

[19] But SCO had been in distress; in part due to the advent of Linux, a series of previously good financial results had gone sour for the company as 1999 turned into 2000.

[47] As Forbes magazine stated, "Questions remain about execution, but the deal is at least a temporary life preserver for SCO, whose flagship UnixWare server software was in danger of eventually becoming irrelevant in the face of Linux.

[13] In addition, Caldera Systems saw SCO's role as one of the OS companies involved in Project Monterey as a means to develop a 64-bit computing strategy.

[44] Caldera Systems had been emphasizing trying to get into much the same VAR channel business that SCO was in,[48] using the argument that resellers could find larger margins with free software than by selling Microsoft's Windows NT.

"[19] Skeptics noted, however, that many of those listed resellers were probably not that active anymore, especially in light of SCO's recent struggles[44] (it had reported a $19 million quarterly loss a week before the acquisition announcement).

[53] The SCO acquisition was originally scheduled to close in October 2000,[45] but got delayed due to concerns from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding the details of the merger.

[57] The merged company had major offices in not just Utah, but also Santa Cruz, California, Murray Hill, New Jersey, and Watford, England, as well as smaller facilities in 16 additional countries.

[60] Overall, SCO had an infrastructure presence of some kind in 80 countries, whereas Caldera Systems had always been largely domestic, thus in part the rationale for the name change.

[34] While it may have been done to make the branding more consistent with OpenLinux and Open Server, it confused people as well as build and installation scripts that tested for system name.

[62] In terms of the question of making some of UnixWare open source, in August 2001 Caldera International did announce that it was placing the code for the regular expression parser and the grep and awk commands, as well for the AIM Multiuser Benchmark, under the GNU General Public License.

[67] Then in May 2001, Caldera International bought the WhatifLinux technology and assets outright from Acrylis, and changed the name of the service to Volution Online.

[68] Caldera Systems had earlier begun work on a Linux equivalent to the Microsoft Exchange Server that was aimed at the small to medium business market.

[26] It offered shared calendaring and scheduling options, SSL support for e-mail, simple configuration, and integration with Microsoft Outlook.

[75] This was part of what continued to bring criticism of Caldera in the some quarters of the open source and free software communities; Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman subsequently said of Ransom Love, "He's only a parasite", to which Love took umbrage, responding, "Did Richard Stallman ever invest £50m in Linux?

"[80] UnitedLinux did attract some major hardware vendors in support, such as Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and AMD, with the goal of creating a uniform Linux distribution by the end of 2002.

[79] Intimations that UnitedLinux would also feature per-seat licensing were unpopular in the broader Linux community, and SuSE for their part said they had no such plans.

[88] In part Caldera International's problems were due to the economic environment surrounding the collapse of the dot-com bubble; investors were very reluctant to put additional monies into unprofitable start-up companies.

[11] Offices in Chelmsford, Massachusetts and Erlangen, Germany were closed,[11] representing what had been the development sites for Volution Online and the original Caldera OpenLinux.

[90] Plans to continue the company's annual Forum conference for the international SCO Unix community in Santa Cruz were scrapped,[90] with instead a GeoForum event announced that would be held in multiple locations around the world and in Las Vegas, Nevada in the United States.

"[86] On June 27, 2002, Caldera International had a change in management, with Darl McBride, formerly an executive with Novell, FranklinCovey, and several start-ups, taking over as CEO from Ransom Love.

[77] IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky said that while the United Linux role was important, the removal of Love from the CEO post could be seen as "moving him away from the controls at Caldera to let someone else take over.