I sent this e-mail yesterday to Lionel. Instead of publishing the real info it gave, he made an article which he pretended to have written himself where he explained his views (
http://www.macbidouille.com/news/2005-12-01/#11945).
Here is the real deal :
Dear Mr *********,
I know you don't do rumors anymore, but this one is huge. The Mac
community is well aware that Apple going Intel is a two-sided sword.
The Mac platform has a lot to win from this audacious move, but a lot
to lose, too. In fact, Steve Job's company know that they are about to
face the dreaded 'OS/2 effect', which means, as you know it, that
binary compatibility, which can be achieved through little or no
effort thanks to the WINE framework. In its time, OS/2 was a
technically superior OS to Windows 3, but IBM made the tactical
mistake to let Microsoft (who were working with them at the time) add
a Win16 compatibility layer to OS/2. As we all know today, OS/2 didn't
succeed commercially and many attribute this failure to the fact that
programmers didn't made the effort to port their application to OS/2's
native API, but just relied on its ability to run unmodified Windows
16-bit binaries.
Jobs is well aware of the risk and, as soon as he decided to revive
the dormant OS X-on-Intel 'Marklar' project, launched a parallel
project (now known internally as 'Dharma') of reviving (here's the big
thing)... The Yellow Box for Windows. As you probably know it, the
Yellow Box for Windows was NeXT's project of porting Project Builder
(known as Xcode today) and the complete NeXT API (known as Cocoa
today) to Windows, allowing developers to create a Windows binary by
simply ticking a check box. Rings a bell? Yes, it IS what they
_always_ meant by 'Universal Binaries'. Truly universal.
Why bother? That's simple. By giving those powerful development tools
for free, Apple and Jobs hope to give Windows developer a competing
alternative to Microsoft's Visual Studio and thus 'contaminate' the
Windows environment with Mac-compatible, objective-C applications,
instead of letting WINE do just the reverse.
As an example of the power of the Dharma project, Apple has ported
Safari to Windows and an internal build of Apple's browser (2.0.2,
v.417.108) actually runs on Windows (XP required), complete with
Quartz anti-aliasing. It is reported to be fairly stable, even if the
Java and Flash plugins still aren't working, due to their dependency
to third-party code. Apple plan to release the Windows version of its
browser for free. In fact, this one was easy to do since they had to
port WebKit in order for the Cocoa framework to be complete.
Now you can ask why I give you this information, and not to another
website, and that's fair enough. The reason is quite simple, actually.
Some of the information I give you in this mail are strictly
confidential (and I mean strictly), and the DMCA would prevent a
US-based site to reveal them. Freedom of speech is not what it used to
be in the US (although I'm an Italian from Canada myself). I trust you
enough that you won't try tracing me and anonymize my mail (you'll
understand that I used a fake name for this). The other reason is that
the team in charge of the development of the Dharma project is...
French. In fact, Bertrand 'Mad Eye' Serlet, Apple's senior vice
president of Software Engineering is the lead of this project and
Apple France's engineers (of iCal and iSync fame) are in charge of it.
It is to be announced the very day when the first Intel Apple computer
is commercially launched.
Sincerely,
John Locke, somewhere near Hawaii
