Menu:
Patches and notes about Caldera DR-DOS.
This (optionally) includes a copy of Personal Netware. It is available for free under a form of evaluation/trial license: "Caldera grants you a non-exclusive license to use the Software in source or binary form free of charge if your use of the Software is for the purpose of evaluating whether to purchase an ongoing license to the Software. The evaluation period for use by or on behalf of a commercial entity is limited to 90 days; evaluation use by others is not subject to this 90 day limit but is still limited to a reasonable period. " See the license for full details.
It seems like it would no longer be possible to evaluate "whether to purchase an ongoing license to the Software" given such licenses now appear impossbile to buy. So perhaps it is no longer possible to agree to this license and the only legal way to run any of this is if you bought a license back in the 90s when they were still for sale.
While DR-DOS does not appear to be commercially available in any form as of 2023, it is apparently still owned by Bryan Sparks (the co-founder of DeviceLogics, and also Lineo and Caldera?). Bryan clarified the licensing situation around CP/M in July 2022 making it clear CP/M was open source but unfortunately the status of DR-DOS appears unchanged. Contacting Bryan directly is perhaps the only way to get a valid license for post-Novell versions of DR-DOS (including OpenDOS) today.
The following versions were released:
A mirror of what was once on ftp.caldera.com (via ftp.uni-bayreuth.de) is available here. It includes OpenDOS 7.01, DR-DOS 7.02 and DR-DOS 7.03
The full distribution includes Personal NetWare, the Lite version is just DR-DOS without networking. Consult the README files in each directory to see what the various files are and what you need to download.
Some quick links to the most interesting stuff are below. Most of these are self-extracting EXEs which you can just open like an archive using something like 7zip (right-click, 7zip, open archive).
Between 2002 and 2011 Udo Kuhnt released a series of patches for OpenDOS 7.01 under the DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project adding features such as native support for large disks (LBA) and the FAT32 filesystem. An archive of Enhanced DR-DOS files can be found in the FTP archive here. See the README file or the original DR-DOS Enhancement Project website for details about these files and how to use them.
I'm not a netware expert, don't have any of those fancy novell certifications and have never administred a netware network; I've just played with it at home occasionally since 2004 or so. Email me if you've got any suggestsions or corrections for this page or any extra information you think is worth including here. My address is david at this websites domain name (without the www bit of course).