Google is making it easier for enterprises using Mac platform to manage Google applications. The company has freed/open sourced Simian, its package deployment engine for Mac OS X. The code has been released under Apache License 2.0. Google made this announcement at Macworld conference.

According to Google blog, “Simian uses App Engine-based hosting to scale with the needs of your growing enterprise, and a Munki-based client which will continue to evolve through the outstanding work of Greg Neagle and the Munki community. We hope this to be the first of many announcements in sharing Google's unique IT approach with the larger community."

Google Simian will enable Google, sysadmins to deploy new or updated software by targeting a single Mac or tens of thousands. It will make it easier to push security patches, whether the Mac is on an internal network/VPN or not.

Some other capabilities include:

• Force mandatory installation of some packages, while allowing others to be optional.
• Tightly manage Apple-provided updates.
• Scale without deploying and maintaining additional server infrastructure.
• Obtain reports on all of this and the fleet overall.

Freeing/Open Sourcing Simian is yet another positive gesture from Google towards Free Software.