Sean Michael Kerner

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is normally not on the list of companies likely to say anything positive about Microsoft. Yet that’s exactly what happened yesterday, as the Free Software Foundation’s European branch (FSFE) congratulated Microsoft for its new shared source licenses. Microsoft’s Shared Source Initiative now only offers three primary licenses, which is down […]

Standardized Linux desktop components are needed in order for the Linux desktop to achieve widespread adoption, according to the Free Standards Group (FSG). The popular GNOME and KDE environments are among the more popular Linux desktops, as well as up and comers like the Xfce environment. Though efforts are underway to help create some compatibility […]

A new initiative from Novell seeks to unlock a better Linux desktop experience by helping developers better understand how the desktop is used. The Better Desktop initiative officially launched Monday as part of Novell’s community-driven openSUSE project. The Better Desktop site provides a wealth of usability test data, as well as analysis of various Linux […]

In a move aimed at creating ”greater agility”, Microsoft has reorganized its business into three divisions. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer yesterday announced the reorganization, which will split the company into the Microsoft Platform Products & Services Division, Microsoft Business Division and Microsoft Entertainment and Devices Division. Ballmer will appoint a president to each division. Microsoft […]

Efforts to create a Linux standard gained some ground Monday with the release of the Linux Standards Base (LSB) 3.0 specification. The latest LSB standard is an effort to help prevent the fragmentation of Linux and is widely supported by major Linux vendors. The LSB specification is maintained and developed by the Free Standards Group […]

Searching for Vint Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, became a little bit easier today. You just have to go to Google. The head office, that is. Google announced yesterday that it hired Cerf as Chief Internet Evangelist. Cerf is widely recognized as one of the founding fathers of the Internet for […]

Imagine that all your data is always backed up on a continuous basis and can be rapidly restored to any point you choose. It’s not a dream, that’s the promise of continuous data protection (CDP), and it may hold the potential to change the backup landscape. At least that’s what storage vendors are betting on. […]

IBM hopes its new grid offering will be an easy entry point for firms still unsure about adopting the technology. The company’s Grid and Grow is a packaged set of hardware, software and services that includes IBM’s BladeCenter Grid Hardware and a choice of grid scheduler, operating system (Linux, AIX or Windows) and services to […]

Between December 2004 and July 2005, the ”defect density” in the Linux kernel has fallen from 0.17 to 0.16 and all serious defects have been corrected, a new report out from code analysis firm Coverity asserts. Defect density declined by 2.2 percent as the total lines of code in the Linux kernel continues to grow […]

UPDATED: Well, that didn’t take long. Barely a day after Microsoft released beta versions of Windows Vista and IE 7 to a select group of developers and testers, both applications have been pirated and are now available on P2P networks. On July 27, Microsoft released the Windows Vista beta, which included the IE 7 beta. […]