Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘OSCON 08 research study bonanza‘ files: The biggest conclusion of the EnterpriseDB open source database study is that PostgreSQL is the open source database of choice for transactional applications. Not a surprising conclusion given that EnterpriseDB is a sponsor of the PostgreSQL project and has its own supported distributions of it. While the […]

In a perfect world, all software would be self-explanatory and wouldn’t require any additional support. But in the real world, ensuring customers get the support they need is paramount to any enterprise software provider. That’s becoming especially true in open source. In recent years, paid open source support services have sprung up as enterprises seek […]

From the ‘open source is a lot more than Linux‘ files: I’m on route to the Candy Store – for open source types that is. That’s right OSCON 2008 is gearing up and it looks like a dandy to me. Instead of the typical 5 tracks of information (for a good conference) OSCON has (get […]

The networking world is now a little smaller thanks to Brocade buying out networking company Foundry for $3 billion. The deal creates a new end-to-end networking vendor from storage area networks (SAN) to networking switches that will compete with industry giants Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) and Juniper (NASDAQ: JNPR). The deal has already been approved by […]

Some names just aren’t “cool” enough for open source. Case in point: Novell’s ICEcore collaboration project, which is now known as Kablink. The newly-renamed project is being expanded with workflow capabilities that Novell hopes will expand business usage. The Kablink project is Novell’s effort to grow the market for open source collaboration solutions, and chip […]

From the ‘here we go again‘ files: The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) is once again filing a law suit against a vendor that allegedly has violated the terms of the GPL. This time it’s networking vendor Extreme Networks. Once again the plaintiff is BusyBox which is the same open source project that SFLC has […]

One of the basic theories behind open source and its relative security is the fact that many eyeballs are looking at code to identify potential and real trouble spots. According to application security vendor Fortify Software, many eyeballs alone aren’t enough. In fact Fortify argues in a new study that open source software is insecure […]

Contributing to open source typically conjures images of working on a project’s code. But offering bandwidth is another critical way the movement can benefit. That’s the approach taken by NTT America, a Tier 1 carrier and a division of Japan-based NTT Communications, which is now helping open source by donating IPv6 transit to the Internet […]

At the heart of every networking device is an operating system that enables traffic flow. In the case of networking vendor Juniper, that operating system for the past ten years has been JUNOS, a network operating system with its roots in the open source FreeBSD operating system. Juniper has updated JUNOS every 90 days since […]

After four years of legal battles, the judge in the Novell versus SCO Unix case has ruled that SCO owes Novell – $2.5 million. WHAT?! That’s it? That can’t be right can it?? The lawyers have made more than that for sure and in the end they are the true winners here. Essentially Kimball ruled […]

What does Linus Torvalds think about BSD? It’s not too pleasant. Linus Torvalds – the creator of the Linux kernel and its current maintainer – is by all accounts a brilliant human being. He can also be incredibly crass and rude. Case in point is a post he made to the Linux Kernel mailing list […]

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is out with its latest critical patch update (CPU), this time providing fixes for 45 security vulnerabilities spanning the Oracle product portfolio. The July update marks the first since Oracle acquired BEA. Security updates for BEA products are included in the CPU as well. At 45 reported vulnerabilities, the July tally is […]