It's interesting to envision the what-if universe where licensing OS X (and other software) became Apple's main business model. I wonder if in this universe, Apple is basically the Google of our time (everything is a cloud service, massive ad tracking, using metadata as their revenue generation), or if they would be more like the MS of our time (playing a game of catch-up with Google).
While I don't really blame Dell for not taking this deal (it seemed like a pretty raw deal for Dell), I wonder how much more popular Unix would be nowadays had this gone through. OS X was (and is) almost certainly the largest desktop *nix distro out there, and if it were installed on every Dell computer (and presumably later other manufacturers as well), I wonder if Unix might have become the "standard" for desktop OS's.
While I don't really blame Dell for not taking this deal (it seemed like a pretty raw deal for Dell), I wonder how much more popular Unix would be nowadays had this gone through. OS X was (and is) almost certainly the largest desktop *nix distro out there, and if it were installed on every Dell computer (and presumably later other manufacturers as well), I wonder if Unix might have become the "standard" for desktop OS's.