In an announcement, the Gentoo community reveals is plans to make its porting platform available for Mac OS X. This is a quite surprising move but also shows the broadness of today‘s open source efforts. It‘s not only about kernels and certain distributions anymore.

Gentoo has been a fresh start in the Linux community so far. Being mainly a „new distribution“ it brought with it a new (Python-based) packaging mechanism and a devoted crowd of developers that were bored with the bloatedness of other popular distributions.

Mac OS X plays an increasingly interesting role in this game. First, Debian affine developers set up the Fink project that is today the leading package deliverator for OS X. Soon afterwards – and due to its BSD heritage one of the more promising activities – the Darwin Ports project followed suit and is currently underway to release a revamped BSD ports system for Apple‘s brightest star.

All in all it is interesting to see that Mac OS X somehow arrived on the nerd‘s desk. Here at Chaos Computer Club Berlin we always had a strong Macintosh community but since OS X arrived, even more of the alpha geeks are switching to PPC hardware.

I consider this to be a good thing as two quite interesting developer scenes melt: on the one hand the true UNIX geeks favoring performance, functionality and stability and on the other the Macintosh devotee, hailing usability, simplicity and beauty. It can only get better.