Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘don’t get Lost on the Fringe‘ files: Getting developers excited about new technology can sometimes be an interesting process. Sun (soon to be Oracle) is trying out a new viral marketing effort to get developers interested in its JavaFX technology, with something called PIE Theory. Basically what they’re doing is trying to tap […]

From the ‘what’s the difference between on-demand and the cloud?‘ files: Open Source CRM vendor SugarCRM has a lot of free community users. In fact, Martin Schneider, Director of Product Marketing at SugarCRM told me that they have 500,000 users, which is quite a lot for a CRM product. The problem is that those users […]

From the ‘BSD Lives‘ files: NetBSD 5.0 is out, introducing a long list of new features to the BSD operating system with the first big major release since NetBSD 4.0 came out in 2007. Among the big changes are improved scalability and performance improvements, thanks to a new threading subsystem that is optimized for multi-core […]

There is money in the cloud. Just ask open source startup Eucalyptus which today announced it received $5.5 million in Series A round of venture financing. Eucalyptus is an open source cloud infrastructure project originally developed as a research effort at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). It is also the key project behind […]

Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) wants to be a platform on which developers build their own services. It’s a goal that could be getting a little closer with today’s release of YQL Execute. YQL, short for Yahoo Query Language, is Yahoo’s way to enable developers to pull, query and combine the structured data made available via the […]

From the ‘digging into GCC 4.4‘ files: GCC 4.4 is a critically important component of the open source software landscape. It officially was released last week and I blogged on it briefly, but felt the need to get more insight. Fedora 11 which hit its preview release yesterday lists GCC 4.4 as one of its […]

Apache Tomcat is a popular open source Java application server and serves as the basis for a number of commercial servers. Yet Tomcat itself is not a commercial project — though now it does have a commercial version, courtesy of enterprise Java vendor SpringSource. SpringSource this week began offering its Tomcat-based tc Server, including enterprise […]

From the ‘still down but not out‘ files: Telecom and networking vendor Nortel Networks is still in trouble. Four months after entering into creditor protection in both Canada and the US, Nortel needs more time to restructure and protect itself from creditors. Nortel has been granted an extension by the courts for its protection until […]

Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is ramping up for its next community Linux release as Fedora 11, codenamed “Leonidas” hits its preview milestone release today — showing off the future of Linux technologies. Fedora 11 includes new open source technologies that accelerate the Linux desktop from a number of different perspectives. Boot time is improved, […]

For much of its history, HP’s ProCurve networking unit has been focused on switching for its hardware gear. Now HP is expanding ProCurve to encompass security hardware as well. HP ProCurve is adding a new Threat Management Services Module that is a plug in blade for existing ProCurve 8212 and 5400 Series switches. The new […]