Apple's Grand Central Dispatch technology introduced in Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" was open-sourced under the Apache license last month by Apple and now it has worked its way into FreeBSD. This software, which helps in optimizing applications for multi-core systems, has ported the libdispatch library from GCD to FreeBSD and made Grand Central Dispatch more POSIX friendly.

Two traditionally proprietary companies made open source releases recently: Facebook released a Python-based web server and application framework called Tornado, and Apple released a thread-pool management system called Grand Central Dispatch. It is not the first open source code release for either company, but both projects are worth examining.

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.

Tiger, Jaguar, Leopard and Snow Leopard are therefore just as much copy cats as Windows 7.

But it does go to show that copying, or sharing, can be rather productive.

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.

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.

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.

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

Apple has closed down its project to develop ZFS for Mac OS X. An announcement on the project's site simply says "The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly".