Sean Michael Kerner

The past year has seen strides in open source’s place in the industry, cementing its role as a major force in the enterprise — with several key players and stakeholders rising to the top. Just what do they have planned for the next twelve months? Also this year, the breakneck pace of development in networking […]

Linux creator Linus Torvalds is expected to soon release the final Linux kernel of 2008, loaded full of stocking stuffers for users of the open source operating system. Among the key new items in the release is a new, stable filesystem as well as improved graphics performance. The Linux 2.6.28 kernel will be the fifth […]

The holidays are a time for coming together among friends, families — and, this year, open source Ruby framework projects. The Ruby on Rails project is now planning on merging its efforts with the rival Merb framework for the future release of Rails version 3. The merger brings together two groups that had been at […]

From the ‘it’s all about performance‘ files: Mozilla is continuing its development of a mobile browser with the Fennec Alpha 2 release today. The Alpha 2 release follows the first Fennec Alpha by just a little over two months. The big difference with Alpha 2 according to Mozilla is speed. “While we focused much of […]

From the ‘even Free has a price‘ files: Red Hat is reporting an increase in revenues and income for the third quarter of its fiscal 2009 year. The most interesting part of the Red Hat numbers (for me at least) was the disclosure by CEO Jim Whitehurst that one of the top 25 deals closed […]

December isn’t turning out to be a great month for Microsoft security — unless you’re a hacker. Late Monday, Microsoft issued an advisory warning of a new zero-day vulnerability against its SQL Server database application. The warning is the second zero-day vulnerability alert from Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) this month. The vulnerability could allow for remote […]

There is a way to make money from Linux even in a down economy — it’s called subscription revenues. Linux vendor Red Hat yesterday reported growth in income and revenues on the back of renewal rates for its Linux support subscriptions. Revenues for the company’s third fiscal quarter for 2009, which ended Nov. 30, hit […]

Network security vendor Check Point is expanding its hardware profile with the acquisition of Nokia’s security appliance business — a move that could see it gaining new capabilities to compete against Cisco and other big players in its space. With the acquisition, Check Point (NASDAQ: CHKP), which makes security software — intrusion prevention, unified threat […]

One of the notable features of open source software is forking. If an open source project takes a direction that users or developers don’t like, well, they can fork off in a new direction. In these cases, developers of open source licensed code can fork a project and create a new application that takes a […]

From the “what would John Hodgman say” files: For the most part, Linux has always lacked good marketing (except perhaps for some great stuff from IBM a few years ago..). The gold standard in operating system ads now seems to be the I’m a MAC you’re a PC ads – and so the Linux Foundation […]

Just what does the promise of 100 Gigabit Ethernet promise? For one, it means greater top-end speed for carrier networks. It could also represent adding multiple existing 10 GbE lines into one 100GbE connection. Or, it could be about transmitting a 100 GbE signal over a single optical wavelength. For Nortel Networks all of this […]

From the “did you guess that?” files: Mozilla has revealed the ‘mysterious’ clerical error missing flaw that it omitted from the Firefox 2.0.0.19 release earlier this week. It’s the Cross-domain data theft via script redirect error message dealt with in Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2008-65.  This is a “High” impact vulnerability that if exploited could potentially have […]