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Why no Windows on Macintel? $12,000

macintel bounty hurts
dual booting

It's an interesting and logical theory. You know that contest to see who can get Windows to run on an Intel-based Macs? According to the OSx86 project, that very contest is the reason we aren't all dual-booting right now. One argument for open source is that collaboration breeds potentially better, or at least faster results than working in isolation. So this contest has stopped the information sharing, and developers are guarding their tricks so they can win the money. Now obviously we're all looking forward to Q or Virtual PC just doing everything in emulation. I want something like Wine, so I can use Exposé to see Outlook and IE6 alongside all my Mac apps, not virtualized inside some other OS window... But that's just me. And I tend to agree that we aren't installing Windows on Macintels because, in part, people are working alone. I still don't see what's to stop someone with real money (like a software company) from ignoring the $12,000 and developing a tool to install Windows on a Mac. I guess this will all be a moot point once the first person has done it. As long as the method and/or tool is available online I'm all for it.

[Via digg, photo via Flickr]