Sean Michael Kerner

With over two hundred million users, Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser is one of the most widely deployed and tested pieces of open source software on Earth. It’s also frequently attacked and fixed by Mozilla — making the lessons learned by Mozilla important for other developers to take to heart. Developers can learn a great deal […]

From the ‘no it’s not Windows, or is it?‘ files: The ReactOS open source operating system effort is an interesting one. It started off as an effort to ‘clone’ Windows NT, and then evolved to clone Windows Server 2003. Now with it’s 0.3.9 release ReactOS is doing something that Microsoft didn’t do with its own […]

From the ‘let beastie out of the cage‘ files: The next FreeBSD point release is almost done. Late Friday, developers released the second release candidate for FreeBSD 7.2 which is supposed to be the final RC before this release reaches general availability on May 4th. RC2 comes three weeks after the Beta release of FreeBSD […]

From the ‘who doesn’t use GCC?‘ files: One of the most popular open source programs (technically Free Software) in the world got a major boost this week. GCC 4.4 adds in lots of new features the biggest of which is the Graphite Framework. GCC, originally was an acronym for GNU C Compiler, and has changed […]

For Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR), the first quarter of 2009 was not a particularly inspiring one, but it does show some bright spots in where the company’s networking business is growing: within the enterprise. That might be something of a surprise for a company for whom the bulk of its revenue comes from service providers. But […]

From the ‘run Microsoft, infect Google‘ files: Google today updated its stable version of the Chrome browser to version 1.0.154.58 to fix a serious security issue. The ‘funny’ thing is the issue is triggered by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) browser. The issue is very serious and according to Google could potentially enable something called universal […]

From the ‘Mandrake’s legacy‘ files: Ulteo is out with a new release of its open virtual desktop (OVD) today that now enables Windows as well as Linux applications. Ulteo is an interesting company co-founded by the founder of Mandrake Linux Gael Duval. When I spoke with Duval last year about the initial 1.0 release, he […]

When Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the fictional “Star Trek” Enterprise wants something done, he tells his subordinates, “Make it so.” It’s a line that the leader of the world’s largest networking firm, Cisco’s John Chambers, borrowed during his keynote address at the RSA security conference to describe how security should work. For Chambers, security is […]

Known for its quirky animal named Linux releases, Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu Linux, is out with its 9.04 release today, codenamed the “Jaunty Jackalope.” The “Jaunty” release includes new versions for netbooks, desktops and servers and features faster boot times and cloud computing capabilities. This is the tenth release for Ubuntu since […]

Though it’s likely soon to become part of Oracle, Sun is still rolling out new product releases. Today, Sun announced new open source identity federation capabilities with openSSO, as well as integrated MySQL capabilities for identity management. Managing identity and access in an increasingly globally distributed environment is no easy task, but with the new […]