Sean Michael Kerner

VeriSign (NASDAQ: VRSN) has been preaching the merits of two-factor authentication for years. With the start of the annual RSA security conference in San Francisco this week, the online certificate and security provider is back again with another pitch for two levels of security beyond the one password-driven login process that dominates the Web. This […]

After years in the shadows, the open source Python programming language is becoming increasingly mainstream. There are more users and more tools. Backers of Python now argue that Python is ready for the enterprise. But in a programming world already filled with languages such as Java, .NET, PHP and Ruby competing for share, is Python […]

More than four years ago I first wrote about a new Google program called Google Grants that was just starting up. The idea then (as it is now) is to provide free advertising space for charitable causes. The program is still in Beta (but hey what isn’t a Beta at Google?) and Google has now […]

Apple is out with its latest security patch release this year for QuickTime. The QuickTime 7.4.5 release addresses 11 vulnerabilities half of which were reported by 3Com’s TippingPoint security division. The latest QuickTime release is the third update to QuickTime this year for security related issues. Over the past year Apple’s QuickTime software has been […]

Reuters is now reporting that Sun is the first of the world’s major server computer makers to certify that its hardware works with Ubuntu Linux.    The only problem with the Reuters report in my personal opinion is that it’s not exactly accurate and is somewhat misleading. Sun and Ubuntu are hardly strangers. And the […]

Beta 5 of Mozilla’s open source Firefox 3 browser is now out boasting no less than 750 improvements over the Beta 4 release.  Among all those improvements are some that users will likely notice right away. In terms of speed, Mozilla developers have made improvements to the JavaScript engine in Firefox. They claim that Firefox […]

It’s a good time to be an open source startup looking for financing. According to 451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett, open source vendors were able to raise a record $203.75 million in the first quarter of 2008. The 1Q08 figure is more than double the $100.40 million raised by open source vendors during the first […]

From the ‘Mozilla is more than just a browser vendor‘ files: There is a new release of Mozilla Weave out this week, offering the promise of improved core synchronization and responsiveness. Mozilla Weave is an open source  Mozilla Labs effort that debuted back in December of 2007 as an attempt to make Mozilla a platform […]

Ajax development is all about having dynamic, Web-based applications that can do things that static HTML simply cannot. But that’s merely a pipe dream if your toolkits — which provide core functionality on which other applications can build — aren’t up to snuff. Fortunately for fans of the open source Dojo Toolkit, its new version […]

It has been nine months since the GNU GPL version 3 license was officially made public. Sure Linus Torvalds and the Linux kernel developers have not (and aren’t likely to ever) adopt it. But there are other stats that I’ve written about from Palamida and Black Duck that imply that GPLv3 is on a solid […]

Google launched a staggering new initiative today to take humans (like me — yes I’m human) to Mars. The effort will involve Google and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic as well as an open community of interested parties. And yes Google is calling Virgle an open source mission. What does “open source” mean in the context […]

In the beginning, there was Linus Torvalds, a single developer who put together the original Linux kernel. Fast forward to 2008 and Torvalds is no longer the lone Linux developer. According to a new report published by the Linux Foundation, as of the 2.6.24 kernel, Torvalds’ code represents 0.6 percent of the changes made. Torvalds’ […]