Re: "One solution is to boot a Linux USB stick ..."
@kb
Your icon is well chosen. It applies to your understanding of the issue.
Firstly, There's lots of S/W that provides for everyday uses - including A/V creation.
As to your SMB accounting argument, I can only assume that you're very young. Those of us who've been round the block a few times remember running SMB accounting on the likes of SCO Unix boxes before Linus had ever set finger to keyboard and when the best use of a M/S operating system was to run a terminal emulator to connect to said boxes. It may be beyond your imagination but that's how it was.
The real problem lies with very specialised S/W where the vendor has gone out of business or which were written to commission and the source was never provided to the customer. Worst of all are those that drive some external piece of H/W such as industrial machinery or medical instruments. In many such cases the S/W is limited to specific releases of Windows. Not only can the software be moved to non-Windows platforms, it can't even be moved beyond XP.
Now let's consider your comment about the hostility of FOSS to proprietary S/W. Yes it exists and no, it's of little consequence. Any OS is simply a platform. You can run nothing but FOSS on it if that's your religion. Alternatively it's there for any proprietary developer to build anything they want on top and that's what happens. This Linux laptop of mine can - and does - run the same Informix RDBMS software that I've supported on servers for big businesses. It could equally well run DB2 and, should I ever lose my marbles, Oracle. All proprietary databases. And if you'd pull your head out of your arse long enough to look around you'd find that your beloved Microsoft has realised that if it can't beat them it has to join them and ported SQL Server to Linux as well.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
