Sean Michael Kerner

Open source project development isn’t just about open code it’s also about open development tools and open collaboration. Linux vendor Ubuntu is aiming to make its Launchpad hosting platform and Bazaar (bzr) distributed version control system, the standard for a new generation of open source developers. LaunchPad 2.0 was released today. For the first generation […]

From the “shiny new objects” file: The first alpha for Mozilla Firefox 3.1 (codenamed Shiretoko) is now out boasting a number of incremental improvements over the recent Firefox 3 release. There is a new tab switching behavior, improvements to the ‘awesome’ bar (aka the Smart Location Bar), as well as some web standards improvements. Personally […]

Outgoing Alcatel-Lucent Chairman Serge Tchuruk and CEO Pat RussoSource: Reuters After two years of continued losses following its merger, Alcatel-Lucent is cutting its ties with the deal’s architects. Chairman Serge Tchuruk and CEO Pat Russo have announced that they will be leaving to make way for a new generation of leadership, in a move the […]

From the “Firewire isn’t dead yet” files: A few years ago Firewire (also known as i.Link and IEEE 1394) was the only game in town when it came to high speed cable transfers on consumer devices. Then along came USB 2 which in some respects was faster and it became arguably more widespread too. But […]

There was a time when Java and C# were all an enterprise developer really needed to know in terms of programming languages. Today, that’s no longer the case. Language proliferation and integration is becoming a key development challenge as enterprises find themselves adopting a variety of languages for mission-critical applications. To Tim Bray, director of […]

From the “one less Mike at Mozilla” files: Mozilla VP of Engineering Mike “Schrep” Schroepfer is leaving Mozilla and headed to Facebook – to serve as Director of Engineering. Mozilla seems to like guys named Mike in key roles – there is Schrep, Mike Beltzner, Mike Shaver and Mike Connor. There is no shortage of […]

From the “Carl Sagan would be proud” files: Google is now reporting that its seen more than 1 trillion unique URLs on the Web. That’s a big number and a massive jump from the 26 million URLs it saw in 1998.  But even at a trillion pages Google admits that there are many duplicates (in […]

PORTLAND, Ore. — There was a time when open source was the antithesis of everything that Microsoft stood for. But these days, that’s no longer the case, it says. Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft, took the stage here at OSCON, offering the promise of collaboration with the software giant while announcing […]

PORTLAND. Microsoft’s Sam Ramji is a popular guy here at OSCON. He literally got mobbed after giving a talk by open source types angry at Microsoft for a long list of grievances. Ramji delivered a keynote address here in which he talked about how Microsoft is working with the open source community. In the Q&A […]

Companies sometimes change CEOs to fix a problem. In the case of networking vendor Juniper Networks, the new incoming chief executive will take the helm of a company that is financially healthy and looking to grow even more. That’s the message from Juniper’s chairman and outgoing CEO Scott Kriens. Kriens is handing over his post […]

From the ‘really‘ files: PORTLAND. Who’s afraid of patents? Not Mark Shuttleworth founder of Ubuntu Linux and CEO of Canonical. He figures he’s ‘REALLY’ got it covered. In a session at OSCON, Shuttleworth stood in for one of his Canonical employees to talk about development practices. He talked enthusiastically and technicaly about key elements of […]

Nearly two weeks ago security researcher Dan Kaminsky, in coordination with US-CERT, announced a critical vulnerability in DNS that could cripple parts of the Internet. At the time of disclosure, Kaminsky refused to provide full details of the vulnerability in hopes that users of DNS would have 30 days to patch their servers. As it […]