Powerful branching and merging support has won Git a new fan, in Redmond.

Microsoft is reportedly moving its CodePlex open source hosting service project to a new tier that will feature support for the Git distributed version-control system. Linus Torvald's Linux kernel development repository has enjoyed increasing popularity since its introduction in April of 2005.

Widely lauded for its commanding branching and merging support, Microsoft's move to align towards Git for this project is, arguably, further affirmation of its worth in the eyes of developers.

An Ubuntu operating system developed under the auspices of the Anonymous movement has been taken down from SourceForge due to security concerns.

The operating system came preloaded with anonymity and hacking applications including ParaloaPass and Pyloris, which allow password-cracking, SQL injection and anonymous surfing via the Tor network.

The rare take-down followed a tweet circulating yesterday from popular Anonymous account AnonOps that claimed the AnonOS was "laced with trojans".

The creator of the operating system released a purported Rootkit Hunter log analysis of the system, said to show that AnonOS was free of Trojans and backdoors.

Oracle today announced the general availability of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 for Oracle Linux.

Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 includes performance and scalability enhancements that allowed Oracle to achieve record database benchmark results (1,2).

Based on the 3.0.16 mainline kernel, Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 includes improved memory and resource management, and is optimised to be deployed as a virtual guest.

The Btrfs file system is now production-ready with this release. Standard in Oracle Linux, Btrfs supports data stores of up to 16 exabytes, is optimised for solid state disks, is easy to administer, and includes built-in data integrity.

A new offering from the Linux Professional Institute aims to help students and others get started with open source software. Linux skills are in growing demand in today's IT hiring landscape, and there are many ways to bolster those skills both online and off.

Whereas many such offerings target IT professionals, however, a new program from the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) is aimed at students and others who are relatively new to the technology.

Called "Linux Essentials," the program will be adopted by schools, educational authorities, training centers, and others beginning in June 2012.

"Linux is ubiquitous and plays a significant role in the server room, on our phones and tablets, cash registers and, of course, embedded devices everywhere," explained Jim Lacey, LPI's president and CEO, in the group's official announcement at CeBIT last week.