Sean Michael Kerner

PORTLAND, Ore. — With more than 170 million users, Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser is one of the most successful open source projects ever. It’s a success that Mozilla is trying to replicate with its Thunderbird e-mail project — although it has its work cut out for it, as its supporters readily admit. In a session […]

From the ‘what another open foundation?‘ files: PORTLAND. Dave Recordon of blogging vendor SixApart (they make MovableType which is the tech that powers this blog). just officially announced on the OSCON stage something called – The Open Web Foundation. The group is being supported by Google, SixApart, MySpace, Facebook among others. Recordon said that he […]

PORTLAND. Keith Bergelt CEO of Open Invention Network (OIN) took the OSCON stage this morning with a key message – Patents have a place. The OIN was launched back in 2005 as a way to collect patents and then make them available under a royalty free grant to open source efforts. “Patents may either enable […]

From the ‘not everyone is happy at Sun (though lots are)‘ files: PORTLAND. Sun has been supporting the PostgreSQL database since at least November of 2005, a few months later they hired Josh Berkus.PostgreSQL core team member as PostgreSQL Lead for Sun’s Database Technology Group. Since then a lot has happened at Sun, notably they […]

PORTLAND, Ore. — When Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) acquired open source database vendor MySQL for $1 billion, MySQL’s community held its breath over how the new ownership might impact their community. During an on-stage discussion at OSCON, the Open Source Convention by technology publisher O’Reilly, Monty Widenius, founder of MySQL AB, and Brian Aker, the […]

From the ‘everyone loves Paul Atreides’ files: PORTLAND. Google’s Summer of Code (SoC) has been around since 2005 as a way to get students involved in open source. But according to Google program Manager Leslie Hawthorne the Google system used for managing the projects within the SoC hasn’t been all that great. So Google is […]

Late last week in the final run up to OSCON, conference organizers sent out an email detailing the basics of OSCON and what was going on. At the end of the email there was a small note that said that the Intel Moblin (mobile Linux) developer day had been canceled. At the time there was […]

Much of the open source community relies on the popular LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) application stack, a setup that traditionally has been offered through Linux vendors. Sun Microsystems is now joining the party with its own take on the LAMP stack — one that could pose a challenge to the LAMP offerings from […]

From the ‘time to sell more books‘ file: PORTLAND. Tim O’Reilly (you know the guy who runs the big tech publisher) is still bullish on the prospect of open source. After 10 years of running the OSCON conference he still sees innovation on the horizon. In the AM keynote at OSCON, O’Reilly told the large […]

PORTLAND, Ore. — Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux and one-time cosmonaut, delivered a rousing keynote oration to the OSCON conference here, detailing the ingredients needed for success in open source and on the Linux desktop in particular. According to Shuttleworth, the key is to make the Linux desktop surpass Apple’s desktop in terms of […]

To help developers produce software that is more powerful and efficient, Intel aims is to take full advantage of parallelism, which allows multiple compute threads to occur at the same time. After a year of being open source, Intel is now releasing Threading Building Blocks (TBB) 2.1, which expands the functionality and performance of the […]

From the ‘everyone’s favorite cosmonaut‘ files: PORTLAND. The quest for the Linux desktop is not a ‘mad crusade’ – so says Ubuntu Founder Mark Shuttleworth who just finished up a rousing philosophical discussion on the art and science of Free Software Engineering. The gist of his talk and the part that got the audience engaged […]