MY Ideal live-cd : a "Pipe Dream"

[distrofan]

Having played about with live-cd's, I am now wondering how i ever lived without them. Of course, our freedom to build the ultimate rescue disk is somewhat limited by licencing constraints. Not that I oppose a corporation's right to gain revenues for it's products, and to [within reason] protect it's property rights.
However, I think most software patients and copyright issues tend to go far beyond these needs, and start to interfere with an individual's personal rights regarding resonable use. Yes, corporations make products like windows PE available for licencing. But only to a select few of very rich clients, smaller frims and tech support staff, who are supporting clients of Microsoft users, have to make do with whatever they can find.
Nope, for a techie, the ultimate boot CD/DVD should provide a rescue environment for all major operating systems: Linux, Solaris, Microsoft, BSD, CISCO etc. While some Open Source CD's do have some cross-platform ability, like Knoppix-STD etc having NTFS read/write utilities, and so on, they are work-arounds, take a lot of effort for coders to produce, and your never sure if a corporation is going to change it's mind, and challenge you in court, or something.
Currently, as long as you use for example, Bart's PE according to the instructions, then it seems we are not breaking the law when you are building a bart-pe type rescue environment, as long as you don't re-distriibute M$ code, and have a sufficient number of licenses etc.
This is an appalling situation. If software vendors, such as OS manufacturers, expect technical staff to support their OS, then real rescue systems, in the form of live-cd's should be made available to a much larger community of technical staff, or even home users, at a reasonable cost. The windows XP install disk has only a modest rescue function, and in many cases is hopeless in a recovery situation.
The windows recovery console is a reasonably clever piece of kit, but in my experience has proved inadequate for many rescue/restore situations, such as a recovery from a malware infection. The change-rooted, read-only live CD environment of a live -CD such as a bart's PE disk can save much time. "Approved" M$ methods of recovery are much more long-winded in many cases, and just waste's the techie's time.
I just refuse to believe, that with all the coding talent available at places like Microsoft, how they cannot provide a live-cd at reasonable cost to users that will also protect any legitimate intellectual property rights that would seem resonable and fair to both the corporation and the end-users.
No, I think there is more to it than that. M$ is basically anti-competition, anti-business, and anti-innovation, unless of course, it is M$ business. We should vote with our wallets, and/or lobby for fairer-trading laws that prevent corporations from exploiting it's users and the public in this manner.