Sean Michael Kerner

BitTorrent is one of the most popular mechanisms for peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. For the most part BitTorrent client applications have been standalone tools, but now, thanks to open source startup AllPeers, Firefox users can take advantage of BitTorrent inside of their browsers. “With AllPeers you just click on a link for a torrent and […]

Network Access Control (NAC) is one of great cornerstones of Cisco’s Self Defending Network initiative, which promises end-to-end security for enterprise networks. Cisco (Quote) is now expanding its NAC offering with a new module for its widely deployed Integrated Services Router (ISR), as well as a new profiling tool that applies a behavior-based profiling approach […]

At the heart of every Unix and Linux desktop is the X Window system (also referred to as just X). It’s a heart that, now with the X.org 7.3 release, adds a number of new features including input hot-plugging support. While hot plugging, the ability to plug something in while the system is already running […]

Eudora is back. Well, almost. Qualcomm’s Eudora e-mail client is taking its first steps in a comeback attempt with the beta release of Eudora 8. Eudora 8 is the first version of Eudora to be based on code from the open source Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail project. The effort to resurrect the once dominant e-mail client […]

The multi-billion-dollar market for CRM software is hotly contested by closed source vendors like SAP, Oracle and Salesforce.com among others, all of whom spend tens of millions of dollars marketing their wares. Can open source compete? John Roberts, CEO of open source CRM vendor SugarCRM, has been out to prove that it can for the […]

Sourcefire (Quote), the company behind leading open source intrusion detection system Snort, is acquiring the open source antivirus project ClamAV. The move joins two widely used open source security tools under one corporate umbrella, as Sourcefire ramps up its efforts in the multi-billion-dollar security gateway market. Wayne Jackson, CEO of Sourcefire, noted on an investor […]

In 2003, the SCO boogeyman was scary. There were fears that SCO could end the Linux dream much the same way, a generation earlier, AT&T ended the dream for BSD. The SCO boogeyman has now been exposed to be a straw scarecrow with no real substance. A judge has ruled that SCO didn’t fully control […]

How much does $500 million actually buy? Though it may be enough for Citrix to buy XenSource, the lead commercial entity behind the Xen open source hypervisor, it doesn’t actually buy the community behind it. Or does it? After a $500 million dollar announcement, you’d expect some chatter. But in the open source world of […]

Apparently having an Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved license does matter. Companies that had once shunned the official open source label while still operating as open source entities are starting to adopt a new OSI license, the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL). For years, numerous commercial open source startups have used a Mozilla Public License […]

There was a time when selling Linux (or even just writing about it) was an evangelical endeavor. Users needed to be sold on Linux’s benefits and, more importantly, assured that it actually worked. LinuxWorld after LinuxWorld, vendors upped the ante with new technologies and genuinely new initiatives. Not so at LinuxWorld San Francisco 2007. This […]