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.

In its "Windows 7 Sins" campaign, the Free Software Foundation has labeled Windows 7 as "treacherous computing," and accuses Microsoft of such acts as "poisoning education." But Apple is arguably even more closed than Microsoft, yet always gets a free ride from vociferous open source proponents. Can anyone explain this hypocrisy?

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".

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.

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.

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

In terms of market share, Free software beats Apple (especially thanks to poorer regions where Microsoft too is struggling to win)

"The FSF, in it’s timeless crusade to make the world a more free place by spreading the use of free software, has issued a challenge to Apple. It does not agree with the Apple store selling restricted iPhone apps. Apple’s OSX operating system is chalk full of GNU’s free software, so they have their hand very much stuck in the fly paper.