Sean Michael Kerner

The virtualization market got another shot in the arm one day after the blockbuster VMware IPO, with the $500 million dollar acquisition of virtualization vendor XenSource by Citrix . The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2007 and includes a combination of cash and stock. XenSource only has 650 paying customers, […]

Novell has become well-known as a Linux vendor, but it has ambitions to be known as a Windows management vendor, too. Enter Novell’s ZENworks Configuration Management, released today as a multi-OS tool that enables patch, policy and endpoint security management on both Windows and Linux. The new tool also builds in technology from security vendor […]

There is strength in numbers, or so the saying goes. For virtualization vendor XenSource, the hope is that, by enabling others to expand its platform, Xen’s numbers will be greater than VMware, the current virtualization king. To that end XenSource today released its flagship commercial product XenEnterprise v4. Though it includes a host of new […]

The GPL version 3 has been out for six weeks, and the debate about whether to adopt it remains heated. Adding her voice to the anti-GPL version chorus is lawyer Heather Meeker of legal firm Greenberg Traurig, LLP. Meeker isn’t just any lawyer, though. Her firm’s clients include two of the biggest names in open […]

Is SCO dead? A late Friday ruling from the judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah Central District may have put the proverbial nail in the coffin for SCO’s Unix claims. “The court concludes that Novell is the owner of the Unix and UnixWare copyrights,” Judge Dale Kimball said in a […]

Reporter’s Notebook: There was a time when selling Linux (or even just writing about it) was an evangelical endeavor. Users needed to be sold on Linux’s benefits and, more importantly, assured that it actually worked. LinuxWorld after LinuxWorld, vendors upped the ante with new technologies and genuinely new initiatives. Not so at LinuxWorld San Francisco […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Linux is a key part of the success mix for virtualization. That was the message of Mendel Rosenblum, chief scientist and cofounder of VMware. Rosenblum’s penguin love is not a new thing, either. He recounted for the LinuxWorld audience here that the very first version of VMware was launched on Linux in […]

SAN FRANCISCO — At the heart of many open source debates is the issue of licensing. Is one license better than the other? Is a particular open license actually open source? In the final analysis, according to a panel at LinuxWorld, it may not matter at all. The real debate may well be around who […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Make no mistake about it. Red Hat is a key part of the Linux world, even though you won’t find the company on the exhibition floor at LinuxWorld. Not officially at least. Red Hat is represented by Fedora, its community project which this week released the first test version of Fedora 8. […]

SAN FRANCISCO — According to Novell President and CEO Ron Hovsepian, there needs to be more application availability on Linux in order to accelerate Linux adoption. Ron Hovsepian Source: Novell Speaking in a keynote session here at LinuxWorld, Hovsepian announced a series of initiatives and gave his ideas on what it will take to help […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Oracle is continuing to push hard with its Linux efforts, today announcing a series of new open source projects and initiatives. Among the new projects are a filesystem, a Linux test kit and a project to improve the I/O interface of the Linux kernel. The new project comes as Oracle reveals another […]

SAN FRANCISCO — It may be thankless, boring work, but you have to get more involved in building the Linux kernel. That was the underlying message to Sun Microsystems and Microsoft by Linux kernel co-maintainer Andrew Morton during a keynote address at the LinuxWorld conference here. His principal theme, however, was one of participation in […]