Project Q

Q [kju:] - a FOSS project combining the QEMU open source processor emulator with Apple developed technologies like CoreImage, CoreAudio and others. The result - free emulator that lets you run alternative operating systems on your Mac, supporting a super wide range of OS choices from Darwin through FreeBSD, several Linux flavors to Windows XP and Vista. While most of the other emulators available for MacOS focus on compatibility with various versions of Microsoft Windows, [kju:] developers (all three of them) provide an easy way to download a number of free operating system via the GUI, directly connecting to free.osZoo.org. Other nice features such as guest pc export to flash (ability to save a double-clickable application and installed OS package, more here), VirtualPC import function (allowing left-out-in-the-wild users of VPC to finally get something out from the Windows license they bought), and a very well written documentation page complete with tutorials make this a very advanced project for the very early stage of development the author claims the project is at. For me this project is as fair as it gets - if you need to run a free OS on your Mac you don't need to pay money for that. If you need to run a commercial OS, well, go on, pay the price for the license and that's it. You can get [kju:] completely free of charge from the project's homepage at www.kju-app.org. There is a download available for the latest stable and unstable build, the development blog and access to the source code.