The Prospects For Virtualizing OS X

seriouslywtf writes in with a look at the current state of the question: will people eventually be able to run Mac OS X in a virtual machine, either on the Mac or under Windows? Ars Technica has articles outlining the positions of two VM vendors, Parallels and VMWare. Both have told Ars unequivocally that they won't enable users to virtualize OS X until Apple explicitly gives them the thumbs up. First, Parallels: "'We won't enable this kind of functionality until Apple gives their blessing for a few reasons,' Rudolph told Ars. 'First, we're concerned about our users — we are never going to encourage illegal activity that could open our users up to compromised machines or any sort of legal action. This is the same reason why we always insist on using a fully-licensed, genuine copy of Windows in a virtual machine — it's safer, more stable, fully supported, and completely legal.'" And from VMWare: "'We're very interested in running Mac OS X in a virtual machine because it opens up a ton of interesting use cases, but until Apple changes its licensing policy, we prefer to not speculate about running Mac OS X in a virtualized environment,' Krishnamurti added."

Comments

And we see why open-source software is superior

[QuoteMstr]

An open-source project would never deliberately restrict its feature set in order to appease some corporation; whatever is technologically possible gets implemented. Corporations trying to limit technologically-possible things by gentleman's agreement is figuratively putting a very small finger in a very large dike; eventually, the whole thing will come down.

Re:Apple is a hardware company.

[Ph33r th3 g(O)at]

Pretty much all but the lowest end laptops are about $1K more than the equivalent non-Apple laptop, particularly taking into account the more advanced graphics subsystem and faster processors in the competition. But I see I have already been modded "Troll" by some Apple fanboi that had his feelings hurt by the truth. Posting with the +1 bonus to make the point that I have more than enough karma to be comfortable telling the hurtful truth to the Apple faithful.