BFS Creator Giampaolo Joins Apple

zephc writes "According to The Register, Dominic Giampaolo, creator of BFS, Be's journaling file system, has 'joined Apple as a file system engineer. He started last week.' As a Mac user and former BeOS user, I am delighted to hear this, as it has great implications for the future of filesystems on the Mac. The article is a great transcript with Dominic and another BeOS great, Benoit Schillings." Another user adds, "Interesting for a man who once said that Apple was the epitome of everything Be was not."

Comments

I doubt he'll be porting BFS to Mac

[LordNimon]

Chances are, he was hired to work as an OS X kernel developer, not necessarily as a file system developer. And even if he was hired in the file system group, it's still unlikely that he'll port BFS to Mac, because that's a brand new file system and its existance would just complicate things. He may, however, work on adding journalling to HFS, much like ext3 is a "journalling version" of ext2.

I've been looking at Linux kernel development jobs in my area, and all of them are for people with very extensive experience (over three years in the Linux kernel itself, for example), particular people who have developed a major component of the kernel itself. Of course, 99% of these people already have good jobs, so these positions will go unfilled for months. Anyway, my point is that it doesn't surprise me that someone like Giampaolo has joing Apple, because it's just part of a trend - only people who have lots of experience in the field are getting job offers.

Metadata

[AK47]

I'm hoping he'll be working on a metadata solution for the Mac OS X filesystem. The transition from 9's file type metadata to X's filename extension has been a big step backwards, and the BeOS is renowned for its handling of metadata. Perhaps Apple hired him with an eye towards imporving things?