Has Windows gone open source when I wasn't looking? Has someone "forked" Windows or Mac OS X?

So, has 'Apple declined comment' or have they "said what's best for users'? Which is it? Can't have it both ways, Harold. ;-)

Apple sells Mac OS X. Of course *they* think *it's* the best thing to run on your Mac; they may even be right. :)

But there's nothing stopping anyone from installing Linux on their Macs (never has been, even in the pre-PPC, 68k days), and there's nothing stopping them from running Windows on their Macs (I've been running XP on my PowerBook for years, albeit slowly, via Virtual PC).

Apple's not stopping anyone. I wouldn't even suggest they're discouraging anyone. But they're not ENCOURAGING anyone. There's a big difference. There's no reason Apple should have to pay to support users who might get themselves into trouble installing an unsupported OS. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

In other words, they ARE listening to their customers. I may be grossly over-simplifying, but I think Apple's customers are, by-and-large, on the edges of the bell curve. They're home users who will never even upgrade the pre-installed OS at one end, and alpha geeks who've already installed ubuntu on the other. Apple's position on XP installation satisfies both of those groups. If the software you've linked to is easy, reliable and legal (I haven't really looked into it), then maybe it will appeal to everybody else, too.