Another news round-up, themed around “competitive fracas”.

Joyent buys Reasonably Smart. Cloud hoster Joyent has picked up Reasonably Smart, a tiny start-up with an APaaS offering based, unusually enough, on JavaScript and the Git version-control system. GigaOM has an analysis; I’ll probably post my take later, once I get a better idea of exactly what Reasonably Smart does.

DreamHost offers free hosting. DreamHost — one of the more prominent, popular mass-market and SMB hosting providers — is now offering free hosting for certain applications, including WordPress, Drupal, MediaWiki, and PhpBB. There are a limited number of beta invites out there, and DreamHost notes that the service may become $50/year later. (The normal DreamHost base plan is $6/month.) Increasingly, shared hosting companies are having to compete with free application-specific hosting services like WordPress.com; and Wikidot, and they’re facing the looming spectre of some giants like Google giving away cloud capacity for free. And shared hosting is a cutthroat market already. So, here’s another marketing salvo being fired.

Google goes after Microsoft. Google has announced it’s hiring a sales force to pitch the Premier Edition of Google Apps to customers who are traditionally Microsoft customers. I’d expect the two key spaces where they’ll compete are in email and collaboration, going after the Exchange and Sharepoint base.