[ Thanks to Patrick
Mullen for this link. ]
Caldera traditionally has focused on the corporate
market by offering a version of Linux that is aimed squarely at the
corporate desktop. Their product line includes a server edition and
as a result of recently acquiring SCO, a full UNIX solution.Caldera has always been associated with ease of use having been
one of the early adapters of the KDE desktop environment. They were
also the first to offer a graphical install process (complete with
entertainment) that was comparable with the Microsoft Windows
installation. Subsequently, they became the standard which all
graphical install routines in the world of Linux were measured
against.Recently Caldera have been mired in controversy, with plans to
switch from open source to a more common proprietary business
model. They now have per seat licencing for their distribution, the
antithesis of licensing models offered by almost every other
distributor of Linux based operating systems. A stance that many
postulate may hurt them in the long haul. After all, if Red Hat can
pull off the new business model there isn’t a reason for anyone
can’t.This latest release is built around KDE 2.1, and as such,
contains a good many KDE development tools and the accompanying
documentation. Some of the benefits being touted by Caldera
include: software integration, default configurations, self
hosting, secure software, system testing, and even OEM testing.Essentially this means that Caldera has tested each piece of
software included in their distribution to make sure there are no
software conflicts. Every piece has been tested for proper
functionality and that any OEM that bundles OpenLinux has been
tested for hardware compatibility. The benefit of default
configurations are the fact that Caldera has predetermined a lot of
the settings for each daemon that is included in this distribution.
This is so you don’t have to spend hours configuring a daemon from
scratch.The stated benefit of self hosting is perhaps the most confusing
for users to understand. In Caldera’s bundled documentation, they
define self hosting to be the “building of delivered binaries on
the same system it is delivered on.” This means that the source and
the binaries should match and that the binaries for a Caldera
system can easily be reproduced. I’m not sure that Caldera is a leg
up on everyone here, as any system compiled from source code shares
this benefit.