Columnists’ corner: Playing at once the historian scribe and future-gazer Tom Yager puts on record that this is the first day of recorded history for IT. Well, technically, that would be yesterday, as in Wednesday, September 20, 2006. “On this day, the phrase ‘information technology,’ abbreviated IT, came into being as shorthand for electronic devices that aid humans in storage and sharing of, analysis of, protection of, and access to significant amounts of digitized content.” Perhaps more important, though, is what IT will no longer be: a department or group of people in the back-office somewhere. “It’s a smart phone. It’s a room full of SPARC servers. A telephone headset? A keyboard?” Technology with no past. Open source: While there’s no disputing open source’s popularity, much debate burns around just how much money can actually be made in the realm. “The longer I work in open source, the more it’s clear to me that open source can crack the billion-dollar barrier. I live it every day, and advise a range of companies that are successfully tracking billion-dollar trajectories,” chimes Matt Asay in Is there money in them thar open source hills?. “Will people pay seven figures-plus for open source? Of course.” Best of the blogs: Brian Chee is a geek in paradise. And proud enough of it to title his blog, well, Geeks in Paradise. The paradise is Hawaii, where he lives and works. But this week he’s in New York City at the Interop show. In this post he recounts a visit with Wild Packets and its view of InteropNET, as well as the announcement of integration with Splunk for log and trap collection. The news beat: Oracle releases add-ons for managing unstructured content with its Oracle Database 10g . The IEEE’s 802.20 working group that was suspended in June is now permitted to move forward with its efforts to develop a rival to WiMax. And managed security services companies SecureWorks and LURHQ merge , under the SecureWorks moniker. Software Development