OStatic

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. It's a pretty quick turnabout from a few years ago, when Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz was touting Apple's inclusion of ZFS in Leopard.

Matt Asay and IBM's Savio Rodrigues have a couple of interesting posts up today on the topic of open source and mobile technology. RIM needs more open source argues Rodrigues, in reference to Research In Motion, which is behind the BlackBerry. Asay points out that the future of mobile, however, will be owned by the company or project that best appeals to developers, especially open source developers. From my perspective, that's true at both the software platform and application levels.

It's only Tuesday, and this week is already bringing a flood of news relevant to open source and enterprises. There are quite a few open source-related headlines coming out of VMware's VMworld 2009 show in San Francisco, Red Hat Summit is underway in Chicago, with news on JBoss and more, and there are even some enterprise- and open source-related questions surrounding Apple's new Snow Leopard operating system. Here are the details.

Slowly but surely, Apple has been trying to crack the Chinese market with the iPhone. There have been many obstructions, and China Mobile has already expressed its desire to push Android-based phones, such as Dell's, throughout the country. As MacNewsWorld reported late last week, though, the iPhone's slow boat to China has finally arrived. China Unicom, the second largest wireless provider in China, announced on Friday that it will start carrying iPhones in this year's third quarter. Is there likely to be a smackdown between Android-based phones and the iPhone in China, and how free and open will China's government allow cutting-edge smartphones to be?

GigaOm has a very interesting report up today on the actual size of the app economies for both the iPhone and Android. There are some fairly shocking data points, which come from mobile advertising startup AdMob, and they illustrate that both Apple's App Store and Android Market are big businesses, with lots of promise. These shockers include: 1) there are some $200 million worth of applications sold in Apple?s iPhone store every month, or about $2.4 billion a year; 2) the Android Market brings in about $5 million a month or $60 million a year; and 3) each month, Android and iPhone users download approximately 10 new apps. I agree with the GigaOm post that the Android numbers will probably rise sharply as many new handsets arrive before the end of this year. It's also interesting to think how big these businesses will be in 10 years. Check out more here.?

While many people don't think of Safari as an open source browser, it is based on the same open source WebKit rendering engine found in Google Chrome, and depends on improvements to WebKit to stay competitive. In fact, it's a good example of how polished a hybrid application--straddling the open source and proprietary software arenas--can become. Safari is the browser of choice for many Mac users, and if you're one of them, TheAppleBlog has some truly great tips for customizing and supercharging it. You can find out about full screen browsing, how to enhance Safari with the free Glims extension, easy ways to block annoying ads, and more. Check out the tips found here, and here.

Today, JKOnTheRun notes that HTC--the first hardware maker to back the open source Android operating system--may be putting Android on over 50 percent of its future phones. If true this is a big blow to Windows Mobile, the platform on the major portion of HTC?s lineup for some time, they conclude. I have to agree, and this is yet another example of Android's pronounced momentum in the smartphone market, where we're going to see large waves of Android handsets arrive this year and next. Android is shaping up to be a hugely influential open source platform.? For Android phones to really get competitive with the iPhone, though, the cool factor matters. This is much more important than it may seem at first glance.

Matt Asay has an interesting item up today called What open source can learn from Apple, in which he notes that as a developer-driven phenomenon, much of the best open source software ends up being written for other developers. He points to the success Linux is on the server, where it reaches a technical audience, but notes that it largely loses on the desktop, where a less technical audience is present. Apple has the opposite problem, he writes. It is religiously focused on usability, but struggles to open up to outside developers. Can open source take a usability lesson from Apple?

Online app stores have become quite a phenomenon, in and out of the open source arena. Apple's app store made it the largest digital download retailer of all, and Microsoft has an app store in the works to challenge Apple's. The Android Market is teeming with useful applications. However, as Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz details in this blog post, Sun's upcoming App Store for Java could become the biggest app store of all. Schwartz also says this about it: ...and this time, it's all about revenue and business opportunity. Does Oracle have anything to do with this?