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Microsoft is spinning off its open source unit into Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., and promoting open source veteran Jean Paoli to the role of president of the wholly owned subsidiary. The move gives the new company a measure of open source credibility and is likely to give Paoli more latitude in determining Microsoft's open source policy.

Paoli helped create XML, cementing his reputation among developers, and in 2007, he pledged his company's support for multiple document formats so long as the other format did not restrict customers' free choice. The masterstroke of diplomacy calmed a brewing rebellion among champions of the existing ISO standards format, OpenDocument, who claimed competing standards (specifically, Microsoft's Open Office XML) would sow confusion.

Adobe has been busy since it purchased e-signature vendor EchoSign last summer. Earlier, the company announced that Dell would be using EchoSign in its Dell Cloud Business Apps, and last month Adobe began integration with Box.net - so users could sign their cloud-based documents.

At the time, Adobe stated on its blog, "We want to make our EchoSign eSignature service as ubiquitous, as, well, Adobe Reader." Well, that day has come: Today, you can download version 10.1.3 of Adobe Reader X and start signing your documents for free, with no additional software needed. Here is the blog post from Adobe with the announcement.

When Linus Torvalds used to talk about world domination, I thought it was relating to Linux. Apparently, it applies to his side-project Git, too. Developer demand has nudged Microsoft's CodePlex into supporting Git.

Most of the major open source code hosting services had already added support for Git. SourceForge, Google Code, GNU Savannah, and (obviously) GitHub have all offered support for Git repos. Yesterday, CodePlex's Mark Groves announced that CodePlex was bowing to developer demand and followed suit.

Gravity, a company that provides "interest graphs" based on content visited by users has announced Gravity Labs.

Gravity Labs is, as CTO Jim Benedetto puts it, "an initial peek into our underlying interest graph infrastructure as well as a showcase of some of our Open Source projects."

After catching a note about the wiki for SXSW being edited with Hackpad, I thought it might be worth a look. Then I caught the tagline, "best wiki ever." Well, that's a bold statement. Then I noticed that Tomboy creator Alex Graveley was part of the team behind it and thought maybe it really is. After a short test drive, I'm even more impressed. Hackpad combines the simplicity of Tomboy with real-time collaboration features that make it a great lightweight tool for teams.

Tomboy, for folks who haven't spent much time on Linux, is a wiki-like desktop note-taking application written in Mono. It's been ported to other platforms, but has been most widely used on Linux. For many years, Tomboy was one of my go-to apps. As I've used more and more Web-based software, I've gotten out of the habit of using Tomboy.

Big fan of TED talks? Think you can do something stellar if only you had an API with RESTful access to the TED library and its data? Now through May 16, the TED folks are issuing up to 50 API keys to developers "whose vision and plan we believe will set the standard for new ways to power ideas worth spreading through the TEDapi program." You might even get to show off your app at TEDGlobal 2012.

Need an easy way to set up development sandboxes using virtual machines? Then you might want to take a look at Vagrant, a tool for making it easy to create and manage virtual machines.

The 1.0 release was announced on March 6th by Mitchell Hashimoto. This is two years to the day after the first development release of Vagrant.

It takes a lot of confidence to label a project "awesome," but after looking over the Font Awesome collection, I'm inclined to agree.

Font Awesome is a set of glyph icons meant to work with Bootstrap, the Web App toolkit released by Twitter last year. The project is courtesy of Dave Gandy, co-founder of Lemonwise.

Apple has pushed back its deadline for developers to "sandbox" their applications. Last November, the original deadline was pushed back to March 1, 2012. Now Apple is giving developers through June 1st "to take advantage of new sandboxing entitlements available in OS X 10.7.3 and new APIs in Xcode 4.3."

According to Manton Reece, Apple is also exempting bug fix updates for the sandbox requirements. This means that apps that fall outside the sandbox can continue to be updated, though users will probably have to look outside the App Store for major version upgrades.

Big services demand NoSQL, right? With nearly a billion notes and almost 2 billion resource files, Evernote should be ready to jump on the NoSQL and Big Data bandwagon, right? Not so fast, says Evernote's CTO Dave Engberg. According to Engberg, some applications may benefit from modern key-value storage engines, but Evernote has good reasons for sticking with its MySQL setup for account metadata.

In a post yesterday on the Evernote Tech Blog, Engberg says that the ACID-compliance of MySQL's default storage engine (InnoDB) is key to their synchronization model (PDF).