Sean Michael Kerner

For years, the poster child of the anti-open source movement was Microsoft, with its proprietary software model. In recent years, however, the company has changed its views, starting an open source software lab to work on interoperability issues. It’s even become a purveyor of its own open source-approved licenses. What do these efforts mean? For […]

HP is among the biggest backers of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in the world. As such they’ve developed their own best practices and tools to help their customers understand what Open Source licenses their applications contain as well as helping to maintain compliance with the terms of the various licenses. In a set […]

Large and geographically dispersed enterprises seeking to tame their network security face difficulties far bigger and more complex than those confronting smaller firms. What’s the solution? A security offering that’s massive enough to handle big enterprise problems. That’s the thinking behind Cisco’s new ASA 5580 firewall security appliance, which is the new high-end firewall device […]

For Zend Technologies, PHP is a lot more than just an open source programming language. Zend, the lead commercial backer behind PHP, is pushing its vision of PHP as a prominent platform for development and deployment of mission-critical applications with a pair of new products. Zend Studio for Eclipse is Zend’s new PHP IDE, and […]

Make no mistake about it, the application acceleration business is a tough one. Case in point: Networking vendor Juniper Networks has decided to discontinue its key DX application acceleration product line. A company spokesperson confirmed the decision but didn’t answer any direct questions about the move. “The strength of Juniper is based on the competitive […]

There are a lot of companies with point products for specific WAN optimization and application acceleration needs. Certainly Cisco is among those that play in the WAN optimization and application acceleration space though for Cisco it’s about a lot more than just point products. With Cisco it’s about building what it refer to as an […]

With the older Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) nearing address space exhaustion, and the U.S. government’s impending June deadline for IPv6 capability, there are certainly more drivers than ever for IPv6 adoption in 2008. Still, for some, there needs to be a killer app for IPv6 that shows why it’s so much more capable than […]

There are some stories that get me more riled up then others. The recent news that Time Warner is now, all of a sudden, testing usage-based pricing for its residential broadband customers is once such piece of tech news. My issue isn’t with what Time Warner is trying to do. Rather, my issue is with […]

Mandriva Linux and Turbolinux are collaborating to create a common base for their respective Linux distributions. The joint effort will be called Manbo-Labs and involves developers from France, Japan and Brazil. While the Manbo-Labs effort is new, tying together multiple Linux distributions with a common base is not. In fact, Turbolinux and Conectiva Linux were […]

Will Sun’s acquisition of MySQL darken LAMP? Despite generally positive reviews from the open source community, that remains one concern as Sun moves ahead with its its $1 billion acquisition of MySQL. As part of the deal, Sun has made much of the fact that it is acquiring the “M” part of the critical LAMP […]

With all the hype surrounding Apple this week and its MacWorld event it’s easy to forget that Apple is a company under a security siege. More specifically, Apple’s QuickTime software has faced far more than its fair share of security woes over the past year. The software plays a critical role in Apple’s ability to […]

Oracle users: you got off easy this time. As part of its January Critical Patch Update (CPU), Oracle has released updates for 26 different issues affecting its applications. The January tally is nearly half of what Oracle usually updates in its last CPU, which came out in October of 2007. The bulk of the fixes […]