Sean Michael Kerner

VMware’s alliance with Salesforce just got much more interesting. The two firms planned to build a Java-to-Salesforce bridging platform called VMforce. That project will get a nice boost from VMware’s latest acquisition, Gemstone. Gemstone offers a data management layer for Java applications suitable for enterprise-scale Java apps. So what can a virtualization company like VMware […]

Sun Microsystems’ OpenSolaris was meant to be an experiment of sorts for Sun on how to introduce new technologies to the operating system and roll them out in a more Linux-like open way. A funny thing happened: Nexenta took OpenSolaris, along with the ZFS file system, and made a pretty good business out of it. […]

From the “Open Source Democracy’ files: Some Linux distributions are named by benevolent-dictators-for-life (Ubuntu). In the case of Fedora, the choice of distro name is one that is voted on (and suggested) by the community. With Fedora 13 (Goddard) nearing release this month, the Fedora community is now tasked with voting a name for Fedora […]

Just what we needed, another one-letter programming language, but R has something unique and special to offer. It’s a highly vertical language with a specific and dedicated use. R is used to do statistical analysis, modeling and visualization work. Up to now, it’s been an open source project, which means commercial support was meager. That’s […]

The latest theater of the browser wars is being fought over speed, particularly speed of handling JavaScript. Recent months have seen Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari, Opera and Mozilla Firefox all claiming the victory in JavaScript speeds. Now Chrome says that it’s poised to once again take the lead. Datamation takes a look at enhancements in […]

From the ‘Walking from $1.3 Billion‘ files: Tom Noonan successfully sold his former company Internet Security Systems (ISS) to IBM for $1.3 billion in 2006. Some 18 months after the acquisition closed, he left the company and this year officially took the helm of energy management startup JouleX. I recently met up with Noonan to […]

When you run as lean and mean as the Apache Software Foundation, you have to prioritize. That means putting only the most vital of projects at the top of the resource list. So when a server is handling 400 terabytes of data a day and is vital to a major search engine, that puts it […]

The mainline Linux kernel now approaching its 2.6.34 release, but Red Hat isn’t in the mood to wait around until it’s shipped to find the kernel for its next Red Hat Enterprise Linux offering, which is winding its own way toward completion. That’s because the Linux vendor routinely mixes both existing kernel components with new […]

From the ‘Open Source in Networking‘ files: While at the Interop Las Vegas show, I had the opportunity to sit down with Riverbed’s Chief Scientist Mark Day. As you might expect, we chatted about the cloud and Riverbed’s core WAN acceleration market which continues to grow. We also talked about the open source model and […]

Software patents are tricky, and they don’t get any simpler in the open source world. But archrivals Novell and Red Hat joined forces to share counsel in defense against infringement charges brought by a firm called IP Innovation. And they won. After three years of litigation, the two Linux vendors convinced a jury that the […]

From the ‘Allegedly Written by Apple’s CEO‘ files: There has been a bit of hype in recent days about video codecs and potential patent infringements. My colleague David Needle has published a great story, about an alleged claim made by Apple CEO Steve Jobs that the Theora open source video codec is at risk from […]

Following the closure of Avaya’s purchase of troubled Canadian telecom vendor Nortel’s enterprise business, Avaya is now looking ahead and talking up its strategy for using that acquisition to further drive its focus on the enterprise network. That’s something of a change for Nortel, which also had a heavy focus on carrier customers, according to […]