DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT ENDORSING THE BREAKING OF COPYRIGHT LAWS AND I WRITE THIS SOLELY FOR THE PURPOSE OF EDUCATION. THE LINKS ARE PROVIDED SOLELY AS PROOF OF CONCEPT, AND FOLLOWING THE INSTRUCTIONS MAY BE ILLEGAL IN SOME PLACES, SUCH AS EARTH.
The conversion from powerpc architecture to the Intel processor and the opening the kernel source has allowed people to do a little creative coding which allows OSX to run, with some modification, on a standard Intel x86 desktop. Apple has little reason to allow or support future development of OSX running on standard hardware, and has made efforts to prevent publishing of information regarding how to do this and the files needed to do the conversions. As OSX grows in popularity it is going to be hard for Apple to prevent this from happening.
Sources for reference:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=open+source+kernel+osx
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=osx+x86+vmware
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=x86+10.4.8
April 10th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
While I do agree that Apple does not want everyone running OS X on regular boxes, the fact that people will be running more and more on regular Intel boxes will probably help them in the long run.
This is somewhat similar to what piracy did with Windows XP. Even though Microsoft had no benefit in having people running pirated versions of Windows, it helped them immensely in becoming the standard.
November 7th, 2007 at 4:11 am
[…] Currently there is NO software which has proven to allow turn key virtualization of OS X. People have managed to get hacked version of OSX to run on x86 hardware, note the April 10th Post “Just a hint of what is to come”. Now with the change in licensing there will be intense development of the server virtualization environment. […]