A group of companies today released a new open-source recursive DNS server. It's an important program. Unbound is so-named to contrast it to BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain), the overwhelmingly most popular recursive DNS (Domain Name System) server on the Internet. But BIND, which is also open source, is not many people's favorite program. It has a long history of serious security problems and is not considered high performance. Recursive, as opposed to authoritative DNS servers, are the bread-and-butter DNS servers used by enterprises and ISPs to connect users to the rest of the Internet's Domain Name System. They cache results locally and pass requests back up to authoritative servers, such as the ones that run big domains like .com. Unbound was written by NLnet Labs, VeriSign, Nominet and Kirei. Unbound will support DNSSEC, a version of DNS that uses public-key cryptography to protect DNS results, from begriming. Unbound and BIND are the only open-source recursive DNS servers that support DNSSEC. BIND is bewilderingly popular considering its reputation and performance, and a great deal of this must be due to it being open source and free. After BIND, the next most popular recursive DNS server is probably Microsoft's DNS which, of course, is not open source or free. Perhaps Unbound can change things.