When ZDNet last checked on the progress of the CloudSpokes development community last fall, there were 50,000 members. That number has now topped 73,000, and counting.

As we've reported several times, Mirantis, which is well-known to numerous technology titans as a consulting firm that knows its way around the OpenStack cloud computing platform, is gaining prominence in the cloud computing world. Now, Mirantis has open sourced its own library of configuration and deployment tools for OpenStack under an Apache 2.0 license. The library is called Fuel, and should be of interest to many people doing cloud deployments. According to Miranits: "Fuel is the Ultimate Do-it-Yourself Kit for OpenStack. Purpose built to assimilate the hard-won experience of our services team, it contains the...

 Have you been looking for a job, or extra work on the side, and getting ever more frustrated even though the job market is turning up? While the market is improving, it's still a tough environment out there, especially for college graduates who have little experience on their resumes. The good news is that a number of recent surveys and studies show that open source skills are in increasing demand at many organizations. In the latest example of these reports, Dice.com and The Linux Foundation surveyed more than 850 global hiring managers and 2,600 Linux professionals, finding that Linux skills, in particular, are very much in demand.  "[Linux] is considered the most ubiquitous and popular free open-source operating system," The Linux Foundation reports. "And if you demonstrate IT skills in this field, you're setting yourself up for a lucrative in-demand career." At Baselinemag.com, you can look at a nice slideshow featuring results...

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 open source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache CloudStack has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.