What I'd like to know is whether we can have a way to time-share Windows applications. Consider an office of 100 people. At the moment, they all of MS Office installed, just in case they get an attachment that LibreOffice can't handle. That's 100 copies of the MSO license.
We'd like to move them to Linux, and LO, but still need that MSO capability just occasionally. So the obvious way is to set up 100 free desktops, and put 5 Windows+MSO machines in the corner, people can then walk over, queue up, and use the MSO machines if they really must. Result: only pay MS for 5 licenses, and start escaping lock-in.
But that's really ugly. Is there any elegant way to do this seamlessly for the end user, with VNC or similar? We need to ensure that 100 people can all (potentially) access MSO in their own environmnent (own PC, own view of the fileshare, if possible, own preferences), but with some sort of queuing system that shares out the access.
I'm aware of the ugliness if 6 people need MSO at the same time, and that this might not work well for video, or advanced powerpoint. But otherwise, how might it be done? (And given that MS might not *like* it, how do we stay legally covered. IMHO, this is perfectly fair, because MSO is only ever installed on 5 PCs, and only ever used by 5 people at a time).