Strange days, indeed... We admit befuddlement as to just what's going on with the I and the M in the AIM PowerPC alliance. The Big M (Motorola, that is) just announced that it wants to buy out Metrowerks, the makers of CodeWarrior, the "integrated development environment of choice" for many a Mac programmer. Meanwhile, the Big I (IBM. Easy, right?) has been unabashedly flaunting a free CHRP-based PowerPC motherboard design all over town, telling box-makers that it's just the thing to throw in a LinuxPPC system. And if you're the paranoid type, you might get the idea that both of these moves look like horning in on Apple's relatively stable and quiet little world right now.

The Motorola-Metrowerks thing doesn't freak us out all that much, but this CHRP-based motherboard from IBM is food for thought. In fact, it's a downright feast, as in seven-course meal followed by an after-dinner mint and a large pizza. For those young'uns out there who don't remember CHRP, that's the Common Hardware Reference Platform that was supposed to make the PowerPC more viable for more uses; rather than have PowerPCs only in proprietary Macs, CHRP was a plan to have a single motherboard that could run the Mac OS, Windows NT, various flavors of Unix, and more. But CHRP threatened Apple in a big way, since porting the Mac OS to it would mean that anyone could build a Mac clone based on CHRP without having to get Apple's approval. Remember, Apple's licensing program at the time was very poorly thought out, and if Steve Jobs can be believed (for some that's a big "if"), Apple was losing money on every clone sold.

So the Mac OS was never ported to CHRP (it still needs a hardware ROM), and pretty much neither was anything else. But IBM's resuscitated CHRP motherboard does run Linux, and it is a free reference design that anyone can use. Well, guess what? We're hearing whispers about projects Apple to get the Mac OS running on the new motherboard, and we don't just mean the whispers at Mac OS Rumors. Yes, third parties are working on getting Mac OS X Server working on the CHRP hardware via the Darwin open source components, but sources hint that something much, much bigger is going down. While we doubt that we're looking at a full-fledged leap back into Mac cloning, little birds are CHRPing in our ears and the three things that keep coming up are "IBM," "Mac OS," and "license." IBM-branded Mac OS X Server systems don't seem unlikely, but could Apple be testing the waters by providing IBM with a license to produce Mac OS X-- as in client, not server-- desktop systems based on the CHRP motherboard? A whole different kind of blue Mac. Speculate at will.