[2] Caldera Thin Clients owned the source code to GEM through Caldera's purchase of the remaining Digital Research assets from Novell on 23 July 1996,[3] who had acquired Digital Research in June 1991.

[4][5] FreeGEM code works on almost every version of DOS, and runs on almost every IBM compatible PC.

One can download all the FreeGEM binaries and source code in one package through the OpenGEM SDK.

It is an extended distribution of FreeGEM that includes features of the original Digital Research GEM.

Caldera Thin Clients (later known as Lineo), who owned the source code to GEM through Caldera's purchase of the remaining Digital Research assets from Novell on 23 July 1996,[3] released the source to GEM under the terms of GPL-2.0-only in April 1999.