Today sees the launch of the Illumos Project, heralded last week in a message on the OpenSolaris mailing lists. The announcement caused much excitement, with many assuming it was a fork of OpenSolaris or another OpenSolaris distribution. Illumos is neither. It is in fact a project to create a fully open-source-licensed version of the Solaris operating system and networking consolidation - the closest Solaris comes to a "kernel project". It's a downstream open source project, happy to contribute upstream but resolutely independent. As such it is a thoroughly good thing and a breath of fresh air.

How does ICT ‘earns its living’ as part of the education provision for students aged 11 to 19?

It seems hard to believe, but the venerable LAMP stack – Linux, Apache MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python – is beginning to fade from people's memories. And yet in many ways it was LAMP that created the flourishing ecosystem of Internet startups after the catastrophic dotcom meltdown took out most of the generously-funded but generally hopeless new companies from that time. That success established LAMP as the de facto standard for setting up new companies quickly and cheaply, and generally smoothed the way for the greater use of open source in business.

IT pros who grew up in the Baby Boom are dinosaurs who just don't get it. Generation Y is full of Facebook-happy slackers with an exaggerated sense of entitlement. But beyond these broad generalisations lie some real differences between the generations of geeks who do tech for a living, from Boomers to Generations X, Y, and the Millennials.

One of the interesting trends over the last few months has been the increasing activity in the field of open data. In the UK, this has been given new impetus by the incoming government, which has promised to make much more government data available (although to what extent that will actually happen remains to be seen).

I was pleased to be able to attend this year's OSCON, O'Reilly Media's open source convention held once again in Portland, Oregon in mid-July. There have been numerous reports about it, not least from the New York Times, but one that caught my eye was the meta-analysis from analyst Stephen O'Grady. O'Grady is characteristically detail-rich and his article is packed with Google Trends graphs, but this quote is key:

Although not traditionally known for its contributions to the open source community, the German-based SAP is adopting more open source software, as well as contributing more of its own code back into the community, company officials said in an interview.

Understandably, commentators are getting excited over the fact that according to one survey Internet Explorer has gained browser market share for the second month running. Not only that, but Firefox has lost market share for the third month running. Should Mozilla be worried?

This report examines the transition from a period of Strategic Consolidation to one of focused Process Improvement, stages two to three in Forrester’s Virtualization Maturity Model. Through in-depth interviews with numerous IT professionals across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, Forrester found that those companies that had changed their operational processes to reflect the unique needs of a virtual infrastructure achieved higher return on investment, greater administrator productivity, more predictable deployments, and simpler problem identification and resolution than those that had simply virtualized and stuck with traditional procedures.

Through in-depth interviews with numerous IT professionals across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific regions, Forrester found that those companies that took a holistic rather than a piecemeal approach to their virtual infrastructure were able to dramatically increase infrastructure consolidation gains and improve their flexibility, responsiveness and resiliency — at a cost they could afford.

Through in-depth interviews with numerous IT professionals across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, Forrester found that the companies that had optimised their infrastructure and that had more mature practices achieved higher return on investment, greater administrator productivity, substantially faster provisioning of new applications, and simpler problem identification and resolution.

Last week, Facebook announced that it had amassed 500 million users, a formidable portion of the global Internet audience. But even as Mark Zuckerberg and company celebrates, others are busy trying to uproot Facebook's popularity by establishing a set of open standards to share Facebook-like features across the Internet.

While the decision by the US Library of Congress to create exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for unlocking cellphones and jailbreaking iPhones (among other things) in the USA are very welcome, the reaction has been just a touch too euphoric.

Researchers and developers - and hackers - can dramatically slash the time it takes to root out exploitable security vulnerabilities by using an open-source toolkit created at UC Berkeley, noted bug hunter Charlie Miller said at Black Hat.

Whether you are looking to consolidate physical resources and create a virtualized data center, or you’re sticking with a tried-and-true traditional architecture, the ability to forestall additional capital expenditures through the implementation of server offload techniques can only improve your financial efficiency—while maintaining or even improving availability, capacity, and performance. And with the anticipated growth of virtual machines per server, it is imperative to ensure that each application deployed within a virtual machine is as efficient as possible.

The virtualisation of network and application network infrastructure is the second wave of the virtualisation tsunami to hit the shores of the data centre. Unlike server virtualisation, because of its unique role in the data centre, Application Delivery Controller (ADC) virtualisation brings with it architectural implications that make a simple vitual-for-physical replacement strategy unacceptable. But there are appropriate places across the data centre and organisation where virtualised ADCs can be leveraged as stand-alone solutions, as well as in conjunction with its physical predecessor, to enable a more dynamic data centre without compromising reliability, scalability, and performance.

Most green initiatives thus far have focused solely on reducing the power requirements of individual devices. While that is certainly a valid approach to reducing power consumption, it does not affect other variables in the green equation such as the power required to cool a data center or the power provided to racks upon racks of servers.

The content management company Day Software may not be the world's most famous outfit making money from open source – perhaps a function of the fact that it is located in Basel, hardly known as a hotbed of hackers – but it's certainly an important one, particularly in the Apache part of the open source ecosystem.

A Norwegian startup is assuming responsibility for maintaining an open source web authentication technology originally developed by Sun Microsystems, and seemingly neglected by Oracle, which purchased Sun in January. The company, ForgeRock, has released a new version of Sun's Open Single Sign On (OpenSSO) Enterprise software, called OpenAM, that adheres to the OpenSSO roadmap established by Sun.

Recently, there was an interesting rumour circulating that Oracle had a war chest of some $70 billion, and was going on an acquisition spree.