Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘Git with the program‘ files: The Apache Subversion (SVN) project is out with svn 1.5.9 providing some bug fixes for the open source code version control system. “This release is intended for users who are still running the 1.5 release line, and contains a number of stability and performance fixes to previous 1.5.x […]

Earnings reports provide an important window into a public company’s financial and growth prospects as well as trouble spots. For Red Hat (NYSE:RHT), its Q3 results show the company is continuing to grow not only via new business, but gaining some key renewal contracts with its biggest customers. For example, Red Hat CFO Charlie Peters […]

You don’t hear much about grid computing these days. That’s because the term, popularized in large measure by the now-Oracle-owned Sun Microsystems, has given way to cloud computing, where Web-based application delivery has supplanted batch systems. Both the grid and cloud models depend on a large, distributed infrastructure, but with the latter, applications ricochet around […]

Red Hat’s flagship enterprise Linux product is flying high, grabbing market share from rival Microsoft’s offering among new project starts, which will likely be enough to propel the firm ahead of its earnings forecast for the third fiscal quarter of 2011. Red Hat, due to report earnings on Tuesday after the market closes, has been […]

The Web as the great enabler? More evidence surfaced this week with news of the WSO2 Application Sever 4.0 platform release that integrates SOA capabilities with Apache Tomcat for Java middleware applications — a move that joins Web services and Web applications hosting. As Server Watch reports, the release means WS02 is getting into the […]

Metasploit is going after Cisco’s networking equipment in its latest update. But it’s not exploring new flaws — rather, the security testing framework is going after two vulnerabilities in Cisco’s gear that have been known for more than a decade. Metasploit Chief Architect HD Moore explained that Rapid7, where he serves as chief security officer, […]

From the ‘If A Tree Falls…‘ files: Usually, updates of Java SE 6 include security fixes — that’s the normal course that I tend to expect. But that’s not the case with the recent Java SE 6 update 23 (6u23) update. “Java SE 6u23 does not contain any additional fixes for security vulnerabilities to its […]

The major browser vendors are all at work upgrading and adding new features to their respective offerings, and Opera Software is no exception. Opera 11, which debuted this week, comes as the first stable release of the browser to include add-on extensions, and comes with a companion website that aims to help users find and […]

Google is looking to help the Eclipse Foundation build out its Java portfolio, donating the source code for its WindowBuilder Java GUI designer and the CodePro Profiler technologies. All told, Google estimates that the code is worth more than $5 million, but sees the Eclipse Foundation as a natural home for the projects due to […]

With the latest update of its OpenOffice suite, technology it acquired in its purchase of Sun Microsystems, Oracle is offering a host of new features, including enhanced presentation editing and slide handling. With the release of OpenOffice 3.3, Oracle is advancing an important technology that it picked up through the Sun acquisition, and integrating the […]

From the ‘Produktmarkte:Patente‘ files: So who is behind CPTN Holdings — the group that is acquiring 882 patents from Novell for $450 million?? Initially the only details about the patents that we knew was that Microsoft was involved and that Novell is NOT selling their Unix copyrights. Now thanks to the German Government and a […]

The future of the open source MySQL database was a matter of high uncertainty following Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, but Oracle continues to pledge a deep commitment to the community. On Wednesday, Oracle released MySQL 5.5, promising significant performance and scalability improvements over the previous iteration. Oracle is continuing Sun’s tradition of releasing both […]