Sean Michael Kerner

BOSTON — If Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Lab is right, there will be a day soon when one laptop per child will become a reality in the developing world. Negroponte delivered the kickoff keynote at LinuxWorld here today, explaining how his MIT Media Lab “one laptop per child” project is an education project that […]

BOSTON — Linux and virtualization technology try to do more with less. It should come as no surprise, then, that virtualization on Linux makes an awful lot of sense to an increasing number of users. Virtualization vendors XenSource, VMWare, Virtual Iron and OpenVZ are among those beating the virtualization drum at LinuxWorld this year, each […]

Nearly 15 years ago, Linux creator Linus Torvalds posted his first public announcement about open source operating system Linux in a post to the MINIX newsgroup. Since then, Linux has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry. But what of MINIX, the “inspiration” for Linux? MINIX is still quite alive and is on the cusp of […]

Yours truly and other Linux aficionados will be in Boston next week for the love fest known as Linux World Conference and Expo. This year’s show is gearing up to represent the year of the ecosystem, as there won’t be any major distribution announcements from the Linux heavies. Red Hat released Fedora Core 5 last […]

Microsoft is expanding its intellectual property licensing initiatives beyond its software business to its hardware business. Though Microsoft is best known as a software company, it also researches and develops various hardware technologies, typically related to mice and keyboards. Three different Microsoft hardware technologies are now being made available to interested third parties for licensing. […]

Ruby on Rails is out with a new release of its open source Web framework with a promise: making it even easier to develop AJAX -based, Web 2.0 applications. Ruby on Rails 1.1 (RoR)? The framework is, at a fundamental level, made up of two entities. Ruby, the open source object oriented programming language, and […]

It’s a familiar refrain. A new Linux kernel is released and a short time later it’s augmented by a point release that addresses a potential security vulnerability. The new 2.6.16.1 Linux kernel point release follows the 2.6.16 release by a week and includes various bug fixes, as well as a fix for a potential security […]

PHP  is well known as an open source scripting language. Though PHP itself is open, that doesn’t necessarily mean that all PHP developers want their code to open as well. Zend, the lead commercial sponsor behind PHP, is set to release a newly re-named tool in April that will help PHP developers protect their code […]

Sun Microsystems is teaming up with Nominum to offer an integrated carrier grade DNS and DHCP solution. The partners claim their offering bests that of the industry standard open source BIND solution for DNS. DNS and DHCP are the cornerstones of IP connectivity, with DNS providing IP lookup and DHCP providing dynamic IP addressing. BIND […]

It’s just an early alpha release at this point, but Mozilla Firefox 2.0 “Bon Echo” is an early showcase for the next round of the modern browser wars. The first browser war was a blow-by-blow, feature-for-feature battle between every Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer release. The new browser war isn’t going to be much different, […]

It’s not always as easy as you’d think to get an open source application up and running in any given environment. Thanks to a new initiative from open source stack provider SpikeSource, the barrier to installation and deployment of a host of popular open source applications is about to get a whole lot lower. The […]

Though Novell is moving forward with its Linux strategy, it hasn’t forgotten about the past. Novell CEO Jack Messman this week announced long-term support for Netware, as well as a number of new Linux and Groupware and Identity Management product initiatives at the company’s BrainShare conference. At the top of Novell’s BrainShare product news is […]