Sean Michael Kerner

There are some people who do not believe that the Linux desktop will ever be a major force in the global IT market. Mark Shuttleworth isn’t one of them. Speaking at the LinuxCon conference late Wednesday, the Canonical founder pitched his approach for expanding Linux to provide a better user experience and broadening its appeal. […]

Over the course of the last three years, more than 11,200 defects have been eliminated from over 180 open source projects. The defect reduction comes in part due to the Coverity Scan effort, originally funded by the U.S Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2006. DHS no longer funds the effort, but Coverity has continued […]

As the Linux kernel is becoming increasingly larger and more complex, Linux founder Linus Torvalds says his job is getting easier. Speaking on a panel at the LinuxCon conference, Torvalds told the audience that kernel development model is working better now than ever. But Torvalds added that there are still areas for improvement and provided […]

Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced the name of 2010’s first Ubuntu release. Ubuntu 10.04 will be named the Lucid Lynx. No I’ve never seen a drunk Lynx before myself, but then again it’s not like I see Lynx’s on a regular basis either. Shuttleworth made the announcement via webcast (now posted on YouTube), […]

Last week Mozilla rolled out Firefox 3.5.3, which checks the user’s version of Adobe Flash. As it turns out, in one week alone, 10 million people clicked on the Adobe update, according to Mozilla. That’s a staggering number. That potentially means that 10 million people were running older out-of-date and insecure versions of Flash. It […]

The practical reality of many enterprises and datacenters today is that they use heterogeneous operating system environments. Having the disparate systems can sometimes present challenges to users and administrators from an access and authentication standpoint. One solution to the problem comes from open source vendor Likewise. The company released Likewise Open 5.3 last week under […]

Barely two weeks after releasing Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple is now out with an update to address several security vulnerabilities and compatibility issues. In addition to the Snow Leopard update, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has also released patches for security issues affecting Mac OS 10.4.11 and 10.5.8. For Snow Leopard, Apple has issued […]

Microsoft today is spinning up a new 501.c non-profit effort as a forum to support open source community projects. The new effort is called the CodePlex Foundation and it builds on the efforts of Microsoft’s Codeplex site. The timing of this foundation, during the same week in which it was revealed that Microsoft was allegedly […]

In the summer of 2008, the Internet was rocked by the revelation that the Domain Name System (DNS), one of the core infrastructures of the Internet, was vulnerable to attack. The ultimate solution to the DNS vulnerability is a technology that has been available since at least 2004, called DNSSEC (DNS Security Extensions) (define). How […]

It’s not free, but Apple isn’t going to be charging its faithful all that much to upgrade to the new Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” release. Snow Leopard will officially go on sale this Friday with a cost of $9.95 for users who bought a Mac system in June or later. Other existing Mac […]