Despite a bevy of questions—looming competition from Oracle, takeover rumors and a weak economy—Red Hat appears to be humming along.

When the subject is analysis of Red Hat, the world follows closely what analyst Katherine Egbert has to say. And she remains red hot about Red Hat.

What with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison showing a hefty appetite for enterprise software companies including those selling Open Source products the blogs and analyst ranks are buzzing with rumors that RedHat will get bought by Oracle. Or maybe by IBM as a defensive play? Or even possibly (gasp) by Microsoft?

Following on from MySQL founder Monty Widenius, Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation, and non-profit organisations Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) and the Open Rights Group (ORG) have advised European Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes not to grant approval for Oracle's takeover of MySQL.

The path to the Oracle takeover of Sun Microsystems is nearly clear. On Thursday, during a special meeting at the companies headquarters in Santa Clara, California, Sun shareholders approved Oracle's offer. The only remaining obstacle to the planned takeover of the server, Unix and Java specialist is approval from the US Department of Justice.

At first glance, Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) appears to be having a bit of trouble: Big layoffs, a stock that is down 80 percent in the last year, and constant rumors about its demise or takeover... However, there are some glimmers of hope at the company.

There was a time when open-source software was the domain of computer geeks and do-it-yourselfers with more time than money. But, as Oracle's legal salvo against Google highlighted last week, those days are long gone. Oracle (ORCL), through its purchase of Sun Microsystems, has become one of the largest purveyors of open-source software in the world.

There was a talk last week at LinuxTag in Berlin by Egbert Eich about kernel mode-setting and the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) graphics stack on Linux. Egbert is, of course, a long-time X developer and openSUSE developer at Novell who was one of the masterminds behind the RadeonHD graphics driver and has worked on various pieces of X over the years.

Dell is planning to release a bevy of ARM-based mobile devices, according to what Engadget says are leaked company documents. The devices include four Android-based phones, two Android tablets, and the company's first Windows Phone 7 device, the website says.