If you just want to help your data flee, give this app a try. The app's about page gives some more details about the how and why of this.
This repo is built to work with Red Hat Open Shift. The libs directory contains pre-built copies of gdal, geos, and proj. You will need to download the File Geodatabase SDK for and copy the .so files into $HOME/app-root/data/gdb/lib.
In other environments, as long as python can see the above libraries, it should work.
- Better error handling
- API