Sean Michael Kerner

From the “it’s all free” files: According to a new study of adult U.S. Internet Users on Home PCs, May – November 2008 OpenOffice.org is more widely used than Google Docs. The study from research vendor ClickStream reported 5 percent usage for OpenOffice and only 1 percent for Google Docs. So does that mean OpenOffice […]

Apple Safari 3.2Click to enlarge Apple is out with an update to its Safari web browser that aims to take the bite out of several vulnerabilities — as well as the potential for phishing attacks. The Safari 3.2 update, available for both Windows and Mac versions of the browser, fixes at least 11 flaws, three […]

If networking vendors are to be believed, the killer app of the next wave of Internet growth is video — and facing a harsh climate for sales in other areas, they’re scrambling to cash in on the trend in any way they can. Alcatel-Lucent and Nortel Networks are two of the vendors competing for a […]

From the “good luck with the BBQ” files: Dell CTO Kevin Kettler is leaving the company in January of 2009 after 13 years of service. I had the good fortune of meeting Kettler twice – once in Boston and once in San Francisco. In both cases the event was a LinuxWorld related activity. Virtualization with […]

At Cisco’s 2008 Annual General Meeting, two items were front and center: the company’s ability to do business in a down economy and its human rights record in China. As it turns out, the two issues are very much related. Shareholders at the meeting brought forward two separate proposals on initiatives to improve Cisco’s (NASDAQ: […]

Mozilla is updating its mainline Firefox 3 browser with a security and stability update that provides at least nine security fixes, four of them “critical.” In addition to the latest version, 3.0.4, Firefox is pushing out 11 fixes for the older Firefox 2 browser, six of which are critical. If that wasn’t enough, Mozilla is […]

From the “weird and wacky ways browser can be exploited” files: As I noted last week Firefox 3.0.4 is out now (technically late yesterday) fixing at least 9 security fixes four of which are labeled as “critical”. There are (as usual) some flawa that I consider to be really interesting – in that they are […]

InternetNews.com has learned that on Tuesday November 18, Ingres will announce its new open source database platform. The announcement is the first big database focused announcement in nearly two years from Ingres. Did you even know that Ingres was still around? Ingres is a database technology that some might have thought was a relic of […]

What does it take to build a company on the back of a non-commercial, open source project? The figures behind Apache Maven are betting that for the widely deployed, open source Java project management tool, the answer is relying on open source’s ability to slip in the enterprise back door, gain fans organically and only […]

From the “ave atque vale” files: For nearly 1,000 years ancient Rome was the capital of the Western World and as the saying goes, “all roads lead to Rome.” Today some 1,600 years after the sack of Rome by Alaric, ancient Rome is being reborn with the help of Google. Google Earth now has a […]

From the “why pay when you can get it for free” files:InternetNews.com has learned that Sun is set to release StarOffice 9 on November 17th. StarOffice is Sun’s office suite offering currently based on the OpenOffice.org code base. OpenOffice.org itself was originally based on StarOffice which Sun acquired back in 1999. OpenOffice.org is free (as […]

There are a plenty of ways to grow a business, including the old-fashioned approach of stealing customers from your competition. The latest entrant is Novell, which is pitching customers of Red Hat’s Linux to migrate over to Novell. As part of its offer, Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL) said it would provide support for existing installations after […]