Red Hat acquires Gluster. Adobe acquires PhoneGap. Oracle does Hadoop. And more.

# Red Hat agreed to acquire Gluster for approximately $136m in cash. Red Hat CTO Crian Steven explained why.

# Adobe announced its agreement to acquire Nitobi, creator of PhoneGap.

# Oracle unveiled its Oracle Big Data Appliance, including Apache Hadoop and Oracle NoSQL database.

# ODF 1.2 has been approved as an OASIS …

I write emails, blog pages, Wiki pages. I create spreadsheets, presentations and web pages. I even do some detailed formatting of photo books and I layout text in detail with graphic programs or publishing tools.

But what I find myself doing more and more seldom is writing standalone documents.

I know the world is full of .docs, and I was just reminded of that, when talking to Marino Marcich, the head of the ODF Alliance, in Ankara, Turkey. I fully symphatise with the usage of an open document format, where there is true openness, true choice and true competition between software suppliers — and not a monopoly based on format changes at the whim of individual companies.

However, my thinking is that the use of classical “Word processing” is a shrinking use case. I may …

Sun Microsystems always seems to be forced to defend itself, whether it is the company’s ongoing strategy amid dimmed revenue and earnings or its participation in open source. As one who recently considered the fate of a somewhat weakened Sun, I’d also like to highlight a recent series of promising technologies and efforts — dominated by open source — from the venerable technology giant.

Despite continued doubts, Sun continues to focus its strategy on open source software, which is finding its way into the company’s Solaris OS, storage technology with ZFS file system and MySQL database and elsewhere. The company recently launched a new Web site where it is figuratively letting its open source ponytail down and more succinctly staking out its place and …

De facto standards are the only ones that matter.

That's a bit of a truism in the technology world - well intentioned standards bodies and departments of justice can do their best, but at the end of the day, volume deployment is the only setter of standards. Ubiquity trumps policy, just about every time.

To that point, I was on a panel recently, discussing the impact of technology on the world's more rapidly developing economies (what's often referred to as "BRICA," or Brazil, Russia, India, China and Africa).

One of the speakers referenced an interesting shift in the traditional media industry: western companies were turning their attention toward the developing world. GDP growth wasn't drawing their attention - as much as demographics. Teenagers and those in their early twenties represent the biggest media buyers in …