At the heart of the Internet is DNS, the system that translates domain names into IP addresses. For the last two decades, the world of open source DNS has been dominated by a single technology -- BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain).

Now VeriSign, the company that runs that .com and .net domains, is aiming to provide an open source alternative to BIND, called Unound.

In addition to VeriSign, the Unbound effort is sponsored by UK domain registry Nominet and is being actively developed by Dutch technology research group NLnet Labs.