I have been hearing a lot more rumors lately about the upcoming release of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). A couple of months back, there was a fairly well confirmed that Leopard would have virtualization support. Well, now I am hearing rumors that the full Win32 API will be in Leopard (actually a rewrite of the Win32 API)! Sort of like the Parallels software only without the programs running inside a containing window.

I am unable to confirm these rumors at this time, but this would be a major coup if it is true. You will be able to run Windows programs along side of your OS X programs (on an Intel Mac of course). This is not an emulated environment like Virtual PC, but instead the application running at pretty much full speed on your desktop. So for those one or two applications that are not ported to OS X yet, you will be able to run them pretty much natively.

I am sure it won't be long before there are Linux and NetBSD APIs. It is slowly getting to the point where the hardware and the operating system does not matter any longer. It is just a matter of what software do you want to run.