Sean Michael Kerner

Some startups are changed when acquired by large vendors, while others don’t change much at all. In the case of content-discovery service StumbleUpon, which was acquired by eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) in 2007 for $75 million, things haven’t changed all that much. StumbleUpon still uses open source tools, and the company’s core mission remains the same, […]

Though the U.S. economy may be slowing down, the demand for service provider IP routers isn’t suffering the same fate. According to a new report from research firm Infonetics, the first quarter of 2008 saw a 35 percent year-over-year increase for IP core and edge router revenue worldwide. That demand for routers among service providers […]

The move away from Mozilla open source licenses continues today with open source Business Intelligence (BI) vendor Pentaho moving to the GPL. It’s a sign of the times that professional open source vendors are embracing the GPL and leaving behind licenses that don’t demand reciprocity. Pentaho had been available under an MPL (Mozilla Public License) […]

Skype users may be a risk from a moderately critical code execution vulnerability that could potentially allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code. The vulnerability stems from how Skype handles URIs.According to an advisory from VeriSign’s iDefense security research team: The “file:” URI handler in Skype performs checks upon the URL to verify that the […]

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It’s almost done. Mozilla has released Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2 for early adopter consumption. Officially the release candidate is still for ‘testing’ purposes but this is a browser that has been in the oven for some time. Linux vendors like Red Hat and Ubuntu  are already providing Firefox 3 as a supported product (and […]

I’ve just learned that open source collaboration vendor Open-Xchange is set to announce on Thursday AM that it will be available to iPhone users. Open-Xchange offers an open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange and competes against other open source collaboration plays including Scalix and Zimbra. Zimbra has offered iPhone integration for nearly a year at […]

From the ‘where are they now‘ files: EnterpriseDB which is a leading backer of the open source PostgreSQL database effort, today named a new CEO. Ed Boyajian, former vice president and general manager, North American sales, Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) will take over from Andy Astor (the current CEO) effective June 9th. I’ve written about […]

From the ‘holier than thou‘ files: A pair of my colleagues forwarded me a pitch today titled, ” Disappointing: Facebook Does Open Source like Microsoft.” It’s an ‘interesting‘ email pitch  — it’s a pity I wasn’t contacted directly. Essentially what the pitch (which came from Bob Bickel Founder,

The Ajax approach to Web development is all about making the Web more interactive for users. For developers, toolkits like the open source Dojo Ajax toolkit are supposed to simplifying the task of using Ajax, but that is not always the case. That’s where the new dojo.E extensions effort comes into play, aimed at making […]

From the ‘FUD watch‘ files: I’m always on the lookout for open source FUD. Today I came across an interesting piece today titled, “Legal Climate for Open-Source Users Changes With Litigation and License Revisions, Wolf Greenfield Lawyer Writes in IP Law & Business”  No that’s not the FUD part as there is little doubt that […]

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is a company that usually keeps plenty busy advising users of security issues with its products. Redmond is now advising users about a blended security threat that involves users running Apple’s Safari Web browser on Windows. The threat could potentially allow Safari to download a malicious file that Windows would then execute. […]