I got the email about Nusphere teaming up with Parallels. IMHO I think Nusphere does a good job of listening to their users. I can understand not wanting to pull a lot of your resources of of the windows version because its so successful. I just thought I'd suggest a free virtualization tool I use with phped: virtualbox.org. they have a mac version. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles (coherence or unity) and they are still working on usb support for the mac. But I use it constantly with phped and it works really good. I simply map a drive to the "shared" htdoc folder of my mac and things work really well. I, personally, have not experienced any issues with this setup. I may end up getting parallels in the future if Nusphere creates some strong ties, but virtualbox works really well for free!

Jesse

Hi Jesse,

Thanks for the info.
I think the main power of commercial products is that you get (or may get) good and fast support that comes with them. As of the free products in general, you can save some money, of course, that's fine. But they either do not come with support at all or their life is relatively short. Good free products are often aquired and become commercial so you'll have to pay for future versions or they die because of lack of money and/or resources. Only huge free products like Mozilla, Apache, PHP survive. It happens because some big companies like IBM constantly donate them and build some of their business around.