Michael Dell, rather famously, once suggested that the best thing Steve Jobs could do for Apple’s shareholders would be to “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” You might imagine that I’m not the biggest Michael Dell fan, and you’d be right.

But the times change.

Michael Dell from a recent article by David Kirkpatrick:

“If Apple decides to open the Mac OS to others, we would be happy to offer it to our customers,” Dell wrote in an email. It’s the first time any PC industry executive has openly shown enthusiasm for selling machines with Apple’s software.

Since Apple is still a hardware company, the idea of Dell selling boxes equipped with OS X is probably a good long way off. Apple learned from the failed experiment with licensing that what happened wasn’t an expansion of sales to new markets, but cannibalizing sales from Apple’s current market. If the user base isn’t going to grow significantly, why cede the hardware sale to another company?

Still, it’s nice to see that Dell now recognizes that there might be value in Apple yet.