Sean Michael Kerner

TORONTO — A voice PBX (define) system is typically thought of as being all work and no play. How much fun can you have with a system that is designed to provide voicemail and call extensions, right? Turns out that when you open up the code and let developers run wild, strange things can happen. […]

Linux has never been a consumer option on mainstream hardware from a name brand manufacturer. Until now. Dell and Canonical today are announcing that Dell will ship PCs with Ubuntu Linux pre-loaded. The move follows an unprecedented outcry from Dell’s users who demanded that Dell support Linux for consumers and specifically Ubuntu Linux. “We’re obviously […]

It’s springtime for Java developers. Interface21, the commercial vendor behind the Spring open source Enterprise Java Application Framework, is rolling out new releases intended to make Java development easier than ever. Spring Framework 2.1 and Spring Web Flow 1.1 are intended to challenge the complexity in Java development by providing a development model that follows […]

NEW YORK — The Linux on Wall Street conference in New York is an attempt to highlight Linux and open source vendors and solutions, demonstrating and pontificating on how they all can work together. But can they work together? Can Wall St., the metaphorical home of Western capitalism and competitive free-market economics, in fact be […]

The second Linux kernel release of 2007 is now available, further extending the virtualization and real-time capabilities of Linux. Highlighting the Linux 2.6.21 update is the inclusion of the paravirt-ops paravirtualization interface, which enables multiple hypervisors to hook directly into Linux. VMware, XenSource, IBM and Red Hat first launched the effort to provide expansive virtualization […]

NEW YORK -– Although Linux is making inroads into the infrastructure layer of Wall Street, does open source enjoy the same success beyond Linux? The evidence is mixed, according to a panel discussion during the Linux On Wall Street conference here. “Linux has proven that on the operating systems side, there is a comfort level […]

Reporter’s Notebook: When I think about technology companies that are major backers of the open source movement, I tend to think about Google (Quote) and IBM (Quote). The two companies publicly support open source efforts and both have built products that take advantage of open source software. Yet Google and IBM tend to prefer open […]

What is the key to open source solution interoperability? That’s the question that the recently formed Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) has to answer. The group is publishing an Interoperability Roadmap that it hopes will help reduce the interoperability friction across open source software solutions. The OSA isn’t likely to be publishing its own standards but […]

The network access control (NAC) marketplace is crowded and highly competitive. Security vendor ConSentry Networks is among those trying to rise above the crowd and the NAC noise. The company recently boasted that it doubled its customer base in the last six months. It has also inked an OEM deal with networking giant Alcatel-Lucent to […]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) has been cloned. And barely a month after its release. The release of the free, community-based CentOS 5 Enterprise Linux so soon after the RHEL 5 release is hardly a surprise; the same thing happened with RHEL 4 two years ago. Nor does Red Hat consider CentOS a […]