In like a lion, out like a Snow Leopard? Apple changed its spots on Sun's ZFS fairly quickly. This week the company shutterd the ZFS Project on Mac OS Forge, and there's no hide or hair of ZFS to be found in Snow Leopard. But as with all things open source, there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

Over a short period of time, three major operating system releases will take place. From Apple, Mac OS X 10.6 (also known as Snow Leopard) will ship on August 28,2009. From Microsoft, Windows 7 has already been released to manufacturers, with general retail availability set for October of this year. Representing Linux, Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) is also slated for an October 2009 release.

Despite begin a unique, key marketing feature of Snow Leopard, Apple has decided to open the code behind Grand Central Dispatch under the liberal Apache 2.0 license.

Back in August upon the launch of Apple's Snow Leopard we delivered benchmarks comparing Mac OS X 10.5 and Mac OS X 10.6 along with initial benchmarks of how Ubuntu 9.10 was running against Mac OS X 10.6. Since that time though Ubuntu 9.10 has been officially released with various changes since last August and Apple has issued two point releases for Snow Leopard, now putting it at version 10.6.2.

Apple has retention issues with users due to excessive lock-in and control; Snow Leopard suffers from more bugs

The install screen for Ubuntu 9.10, or Karmic Koala, which comes sniffing at the heels of Apple Snow Leopard and Microsoft Windows 7. That said, there is always a new or recent Ubuntu: the team puts out a new release every six months.

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.0 Beta 2 for Mac today. Bordeaux 2.0.0 Beta 2 marks major progress over the older Beta 1 release. With this release we now support Leopard and Snow Leopard.

Free Software Movement launched the Windows7sins site. This was just days before Apple released its Snow Leopard OS, prompting a lot of criticisms from some corners of the blogosphere that the FSF is giving Apple a free ride. I simply disagree.

Nokia has released Version 4.6 of its Qt cross-platform application and UI framework. Qt 4.6 includes support for the Symbian platform for the first time, and adds Windows 7, Apple Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard), and the upcoming Maemo 6 to the list of Qt-supported platforms.