If you’re familar with the Darwine project, then this isn’t anything new. And this tidbit of news itself is already a couple weeks old, but I never got around to posting it, and I wanted to bring it up.

Darwine is an open source project for Macs (via OS X’s open source Darwin) that piggy-backs on the WINE open source project for Linux. Basically, it is a project to allow Windows applications to run on your computer without the Windows operating system. It does this by emulating the Windows APIs.

So a Red Hat box could run a Windows application side-by-side its X11 apps. This is obviously a bit easier on an x86 build of Linux; thus the separate project–Darwine–for running Windows apps on Mac OS X on a non-Intel processor. Well, with the advent of Mac OS X going Intel native, this task just got a whole lot easier. Which is a relative statement, of course, because in general the premise of the project is very challenging, and notably also very volatile. For instance, the project is limited in what applications can run, and this is after years of development during the stagnant period of Windows XP inactivity. With the release of Windows Vista, undoubtedly the project will be broken yet again for quite some time.

But my purpose isn’t pessimism. My featured article today (MacSlash: Darwine Not Functional On Intel Macs) reports the great progress they’ve made in getting Darwine to work on Intel Macs, and ponders the possibilities of future progress. It is exciting to see this development; it is very sad that this project will probably never have the time or development energy to mature into something that can be used on a wide scale.

Nevertheless, it is worth keeping an eye on!