Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Among countless other things, I’m thankful to have a weekday during which I can leave my BlackBerry powered down.I have also chosen today to give overdue thanks to the Leopard project team. The Darwin kernel used in Leopard has been posted to Macosforge.org. This figured into my ten out of ten review score, but yelling about sources in a review targeted to users, admins and IT buyers is a little too gearheady. If Apple is popping any champagne corks over Leopard being InfoWorld’s first ten out of ten review, then I bid them set aside a well-chilled bottle of the finest (or their preferred adult or hypercaffeinated beverage) for Kevin Van Vechten and his team.If you watch for Darwin kernel releases, you might have bookmarked Apple’s Darwin kernel (xnu) project page, which still shows Tiger 10.4.8 as the newest announced version of the Darwin kernel. Keeping the news page current for media snoops isn’t as important as getting the real work done. I confess being glad for that, because not many can grasp the relevance of Apple’s lock-step kernel source publishing policy. The sure-fire URL to bookmark for up to the minute Darwin sources is https://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/tarballs/apsl/, which is an HTML gateway into Apple’s open source version control system. The pretty page URL, which also provides convenient pointers to tools, docs and related sources, is at https://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/. I haven’t watched that page closely enough to vouch that it is kept up to date, but the xnu (kernel) releases listed there do reflect the full list of downloadable tarballs.By keeping the release of kernel sources in step with commercial OS X updates a priority, Apple’s engineers, program and project managers have now put a universe’s worth of distance between OS X and other commercial OSes. Readers should know that xnu, the Darwin kernel, is an “extra mile” project. Publication of the kernel sources is not mandated by a license lien on any of Darwin’s open source components. The BSD license attached to much of the Darwin kernel requires attribution, not distribution. I’ve always admired that.The Leopard project team’s brilliance and vision doesn’t end there. I’ve unearthed some exciting details that deserve a post headline of their own, to follow immediately. Software Development