GmailFS for Mac OS X

So sayeth Amit Singh in his Google Mac Blog and amen say I.

I actually got turned onto this lead by one of the feeds I watch regularly, and was surprised to find out that the port and subsequent installation on OS X is in fact as straight forward and relatively painless as the original article suggests. Nice walkthrough.

On a different note, I have regular heated conversations with my boss ( a Gentoo Linux user and previously a FreeBSD zealot ) over the inexorable shift away from open source principles by Apple, leading it to look and feel more and more like a "devil you know" proprietary option to Microsoft. You know, the same locked in, do it our way, take it or leave it experience.

I dunno.

A number of pet peeves have recently started to gnaw at my armour of righteousness
and I tell myself everyday that I am not being naive - and truth be told, he may well
be right.
I do see a remarkable effort made by Apple to embrace the open source community and to position itself as the champion of choice  freedom and all things anti-MS; but that's all just clever marketing surely? Inside the Darwin kernel lies a dark and fetid abomination of a linux kernel, with some nasty little chop-shop code adjustments to get the OS to play nice with Apple's particular selection of hardware. Ugh.

Funny really, amidst cries of "...but it runs Unix..." there is a port to OS X of a Linux application.

Nice job Amit. Bringing Mac OS X inline with the Open Source crowd.