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'They have it, we want it. Mac OS X on the Intel platform. It's [OS X] a beautiful OS, with all the power of a BSD environment,' is the American site's introduction to the petition. BSD refers to the variety of Unix which Apple's software engineers have used at the core of Mac OS X.

The group posted an online petition at www.osxonintel.com and collected over 9,000 signatures within the first ten days of its launch.

Reflecting the group's roots in the NeXTStep development community the site's owner, Sean Moore, asserts: 'We know it will run on the Intel platform, we know our hardware [Intel -based PCs] will handle it.'

NeXTStep was the cross platform operating system (which ran on Intel x86 processors) that Steve Jobs' NeXT company produced before it was bought by Apple in 1996 . Since Jobs' return

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to run Apple most of the software engineering team is headed up by ex-NeXT executives and Rhapsody, the operating system has mutated into Mac OS X.

Since then, however, Apple has dropped plans to make its operating system work on anything other than Mac hardware and one of Jobs' first actions when he re-took control of Apple was to terminate the Mac OS clone business.

Indeed, even the site ruefully observes that 'Apple wants to sell G4's, plain and simple.' Jobs and Apple have also made it clear that the company's unique control of both hardware and software makes it possible for Apple to create easier to use and more reliable computer systems, which are especially suited to the consumer market the company is targetting.

However, two market trends have converged which may yet cause Apple to reconsider. Firstly, Motorola has proved unable to keep up with Intel and AMD in the processor speed race. The fastest G4 processor shipped in a Mac clocks in at just 500 MHz while Pentium-class CPUs have reached the 1GHz level.

Additionally, the rapid growth of Linux looks certain to be consolidated by the emergence of more Mac like GUIs from companies like Eazel, which is staffed by many of the former Apple employees who developed the original Mac GUI. Given that a Linux/Eazel hybrid could clean up in the PC market, the tempatation could yet prove irrestible for Apple to ignore.