ZFS is a filesystem developed by Sun. The self-professed "last word in file systems" no less. If there's something Sun knows how to do it's design and implement kick-ass OS/hardware level software, and of course now (nearly) all Solaris code is open source.

This is the kind of innovation acceleration that Vanevar Bush was talking about for the post-WWII scientific community - now we're really getting there in the commercial, as well as academic, software community.

Google is gaining from, and feeding open source. So is Sun. So is Apple. Oracle is testing at the edges, others are tipping their toes in as well. Which makes you wonder about the people being left out. Specifically Microsoft.

Microsoft's inability to deliver a next generation file system is well documented (even on their own winFS blog). Let's see - even in the early '90s Windows was planning an object file system. Apple had a similar early '90s foray (Pink/Taligent), but now they don't have to - they just tweak some code from Sun.

The more we figure out how open source fits into "co-opetition" (I hate that non-word, but there it is) the faster software will progress. Being the biggest software company in the world isn't going to save you when Chinese and Indian companies start to bootstrap themselves on open source and feed back into it.

Secondly a parcel I almost forgot was coming, the hard copy of Agile Development with Rails - 2nd Ed. The content is no surprise since I had access to the draft pdfs, but this really is a great book. I'm not doing a lot of rails development, but I have to say that the pragmatic programmers books in general are very good. They are selective like O'Reilly used to be, and they are almost as friendly as Randal Schwartz's standard-setting Learning Perl (aka the Camel book).

It's going to be a very geeky Christmas :)