Sean Michael Kerner

The cloud isn’t just another word for basic application hosting on a single remote server. The cloud involves the notion of distributed assets that are highly available and scalable. It’s a technical paradigm that has inspired Linux vendor Red Hat to launch new open source projects to develop novel infrastructure and applications for the cloud. […]

Ever since the first KDE 4 release in 2008, the KDE open source desktop has been evolving to provide a different type of experience for Linux users With the KDE Software Compilation (SC) 4.4 release today, KDE’s desktop evolution continues with more than 1,400 new features and nearly 7,300 bugs fixed. “KDE SC 4.4 is […]

Mozilla’s open source Firefox Web browser is used today by over 6 million Apple Mac users. To date, Mozilla has supported Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6 for both Firefox 3.5 and for the recently released Firefox 3.6, though not all three Mac OS versions are likely to be supported under Firefox’s next major […]

An open source app store from a Linux vendor is a good idea, right? As it turns out, Linux vendors selling their open source partners solutions directly isn’t always a recipe for success. Just ask Red Hat, or its rival Novell. In 2007, Red Hat launched an effort called the Red Hat Exchange (RHX), a […]

With Firefox 3.6 now out the door, what new features are coming next for Mozilla’s open source browser? Starting with Firefox 3.6, Mozilla developers are now set to more rapidly iterate and integrate features as part of its ‘Lorentz’ branch. With Lorentz, Mozilla developers are aiming to include new features faster while maintaining backwards compatibility […]

To date, Novell has had strong usage of its online SUSE Studio Linux appliance development service, with over 250,000 software appliances built. Even with that success, Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL) sees a need to expand the effort with a new SUSE Appliance Toolkit providing an on-premises version of SUSE Studio, as well as a new Lifecycle […]

One of the key items that Google’s Chrome browser had lacked since its first release in September 2008 was an extensions system for add-ons. It’s an omission that has now been corrected with the release of Chrome 4 today for Windows. Linux and Macintosh versions of Chrome 4 stable are not yet available. Chrome 4 […]

The move towards a fully Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) system took a step forward today. ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has announced the first four countries that have completed a key milestone in the IDN process — an effort to expand domain names to support non-Latin alphabets. Arabic and Cyrillic are […]

The saga of Oracle’s $7 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which started back in April 2009, is near its end. Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) today announced that the European Commission has finally provided it with unconditional regulatory approval to acquire Sun. The Europeans had held up the acquisition for months over concerns about how the open […]

Apple has released its first security fixes of 2010 for Mac OS 10.5 and 10.6, addressing a number of fixes in third-party code that Apple uses as part of its operating system. One of those third-party items is Adobe’s Flash Player plug-in, which is being updated to version 10.0.42 for Mac OS. Adobe’s software, including […]