Conectiva was a company founded on August 28, 1995, in Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil, by a group of friends, among them Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo, who was a pioneer in the distribution of Linux and open source software in Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and English for all of Latin America.
He was brought up in Curitiba, Brazil and worked for Conectiva for six years, during which time he became involved in kernel programming.
Original supporters included several computing companies and groups, including Compaq, Conectiva, IBM, Linux-HA, MSC Software, the Open Source Development Lab, OSCAR, Red Hat, SGI and SUSE.