Of course we should also work with the free alternatives. I am personally, however, quite pragmatic about free/non-free as long as the basic free infrastructure is in place, and the non-free software lives in rather small and well-defined niches, with free alternatives under development. Running a Windows version under Linux does in itself require a license, and for me, there is not a big issue to pay another license for what is, essentially, transferring Windows to a virtual state (VMware Player is free of charge). From an open software viewpoint, I think it is strategically quite important to be able to turn the M$ "embrace and extend" tactics around, running Windows virtually under Linux whenever we need it.

It turned out that VMware Workstation 6.5.2, bundle, installed smoothly under 6.0.1 with a 4GB persistent image. No problems at all, and a W2K virtual machine installed under Workstation 6.0 powered up flawlessly, after having been stored away for more than a year. So I guess it will be possible to include this in a remastered version, but maybe it is not that important, if other packages are compressed. There is no way to have room for the virtual machines on the images, and I set up a big ext3-partition, /store, on the harddisk, where I put the virtual machines. (10GB virtual machine for W2K) For backup, I create compressed tarballs, and these may fit on a DVD.

I haven't tried to install WinXP yet, but WInXP and most Vista variants are known to run smoothly in Workstation, so there should be no big problems with it.
One of the real nice things, is to run W2K on an external 1920x1200 display (right now from a laptop with 1400x1050 display and Intel 855-integrated chip), without having to think about drivers at all! Linux/Knoppix presents a simple world for the Windows versions and programs to run in.