Caldera OpenLinux is a defunct Linux distribution produced by Caldera, Inc. (and its successors Caldera Systems and Caldera International) that existed from 1997 to 2002. Based on the German LST Power Linux distribution, OpenLinux was an early high-end "business-oriented" distribution that included features it developed, such as an easy-to-use, graphical installer and graphical and web-based system administration tools, as well as features from bundled proprietary software. In its era, Caldera OpenLinux was one of the four major commercial Linux distributions, the others being Red Hat Linux, Turbolinux, and SuSE Linux.

By 1994, under CEO Ray Noorda's purview, Novell Corsair was a project run by Novell's advanced technology group that sought to put together a desktop metaphor with Internet connectivity and toward that end conducted research on how to better and more easily integrate and manage network access for users. At the time, the Internet was dominated by Unix-based operating systems, but the Novell group saw the Unixes of the day as being too hardware intensive, too large, and charging too much in license fees. They became convinced that Linux offered the best possible answer for the operating system component, and started building code towards that purpose, including contributing work on IPX networking for NetWare and Wine compatibility layer for Windows. However, Noorda departed from Novell and under new management, the Linux role in Corsair was dropped.

Caldera, Inc. was founded in 1994 by Bryan Wayne Sparks and Ransom H. Love and received start-up funding from Noorda's Utah-focused Canopy Group, and Caldera became one of the first commercial companies putting out a Linux distribution. That first distribution was Caldera Network Desktop, which was based on Red Hat Commercial Linux. It seemed primarily aimed at the office desktop and custom solutions markets.

One of the features of Caldera Network Desktop was an installation component called LISA (Linux Installation and System Administration), which had been developed with the Germany-based Linux Support Team (LST). In terms of Linux distributions, that group was responsible for LST Power Linux, a Slackware-derived distribution that had been maintained by LST since its first incarnation in 1993. Caldera Network Desktop ended sales in March 1997.

Caldera, Inc. collaborated with the LST staff, which by then had become LST Software GmbH, and its LST Power Linux distribution, which was made the basis of their following product. Then in May 2007, it was announced at Linux Kongress that Caldera, Inc. was acquiring LST and its development center in Erlangen, Germany, thus creating Caldera Deutschland GmbH.

This new product was named Caldera OpenLinux. (The name OpenLinux tended to annoy people associated with other Linux distributions, falsely suggesting as it did that the other distributions were not open.) Review copies of it became available by March 1997. By one account, it was the first commercial distribution to include version 2 of the Linux kernel.

Caldera offered three versions of OpenLinux, with one for hackers and the other two for resellers and commercial users. Alternatively, the three versions could be seen as a base version, a workstation version, and a server version. Pricing could also change; at one point, the product breakdown was:

Earliest versions of OpenLinux came on CD-ROMs for installation, but it was often necessary to create floppy disks for the initial boot, depending upon the BIOS capabilities of the IBM PC compatible system being installed. That floppy was not shipped by the distribution and had to be cut by the user. At another point in time, Caldera OpenLinux was also available on a retail basis, in the form of a CD-ROM for installing Linux on a PC that sold for US$49.