Sean Michael Kerner

With MontaVista Software’s latest release of Linux Professional version 5, the Linux vendor is upping the ante in the race to provide faster and more robust embedded Linux capabilities. The new release adds more real time capabilities, which MontaVista has offered for over a year. It also enables USB  devices to interact with each other […]

The 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) networking standard promises great speed in data transfer rates. Too bad it hasn’t been as easy to take advantage of its 1 gigabit per second rates. Sun Microsystems  is hoping to change that with a new breed of multi-threaded 10 GbE networking technology that aims to take full advantage […]

Virtualization  isn’t only about supporting a virtualized operating system. Storage and security are key support sectors in any enterprise IT environment, real or virtual. XenSource, the commercial vendor behind the open source Xen project, has this crazy quilt of complexity in mind with its latest product release called XenEnterprise 3.2. Is it a Xen way […]

Oracle is working hard to release the next version of Oracle Enterprise Linux, which is based on the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Oracle said it has at least 25 customer wins for its Oracle Enterprise Linux, including at least one customer that it shares with arch-rival Red Hat . If recent Oracle […]

Thanks to the Novell-sponsored open source Mono effort and its contributors, the idea of cross-platform ASP.NET development isn’t a dream. It’s a reality. But how quickly can you go from being only conceptually possible to becoming a reality and then deployed? For the winner of the first round of the Race to Linux 2 contest, […]

Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik used his company’s fiscal fourth-quarter and fiscal year earnings call to acknowledge that, although Yahoo is using Oracle Linux, the search engine has not displaced Red Hat. In fact, he said, his company is on the verge of expanding its Yahoo footprint. Red Hat’s expanded Yahoo footprint will come at […]

The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) again voted against the creation of an .xxx top level domain (TLD) after some spirited debate. “This decision was the result of very careful scrutiny and consideration of all the arguments,” said ICANN chairman Vint Cerf in a statement. “That consideration has led […]

IBM  is heating up the open source middleware space with a new migration tool for moving from Red Hat’s JBoss Application Server to Apache Geronimo. IBM claims that the Apache model offers greater community collaboration that what JBoss offers, a claim that Red Hat disputes. Millions of dollars are at stake in the hotly-contested open […]

New language in the third draft of the GNU General Public License , GPL v3, has the potential to reach beyond big Linux vendors with its proposed licensing rules that govern how most open source software is deployed and modified. Some of the terms in the just-released draft also have the potential to adjust software […]

As promised, the third draft of the GPL 3 was released today, strongly influenced and delayed by the patent agreement between Novell and Microsoft. The third draft also refines terms on termination, compatibility and applicability of the defining license of the Free Software movement. The ultimate effect of the GPL version 3 may well be […]

For the first time in almost three years, the open source BIND Domain Name System (DNS)  server, which translates and routes IP addresses into domain names, is getting a key point upgrade. The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), which oversees the development of BIND and offers commercial support services for it, claims that BIND 9.4 has […]

It’s now faster than ever to take advantage of security vulnerabilities thanks to a revamped open source Metasploit 3.0 framework that includes new features and boasts 177 included exploits. Metasploit is a framework for developing, testing, and using exploit code. Though it is intended for use by the security researcher community, it has been used […]