Direktronik has a very interesting product called "USB Anywhere" (http://www.direktronik.se/prod/prod75.ASP). With this product, we might been able to support all USB products, without ThinLinc support. The only problem seems to be the question of how multiple devices are handled on a Windows Terminal Server. Needs investigation.
There's a commercial software-based product for Windows now: http://www.fabulatech.com/usb-over-network.html Seems to work fairly well.
Fabulatech is working on Linux support. I will recieve a beta version when ready.
The technical group in TUG wants this, especially support for scanners and webcams.
Windows 2008 includes a solution, sort of: From http://www.brianmadden.com/content/article/Microsofts-Complete-Longhorn-Terminal-Server-Feature-List: "Redirection of Plug-n-Play devices with UDMF drivers. In Terminal Services for Longhorn, Microsoft is taking a different approach to client device redirection. Instead of trying to write a client redirection engine for every single type of client device (drives, ports, printers, etc.), Microsoft is writing a more generic redirection engine that can make almost any PnP device on the client available within a remote Terminal Server session. The catch is that the client device will need to have a UMDF (?user mode driver framework?) compliant drive. Does this mean that Terminal Server will support USB redirection? Generically you could say ?yes,? Longhorn will have USB redirection, but the full answer is ?yes? there will be USB redirection ?if? the device has a UMDF driver. The other caveat is that Microsoft has not yet finalized the specific set of UMDF device classes that will be supported for redirection, so this won?t necessarily work for every single device." See also http://www.thinlincusergroup.se/forum/teknik/74208857.
http://www.usb-server.com/ is also interesting.
Will be in Fedora 16: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UsbNetworkRedirection
Tangentially related; USB/IP is now in the 3.17 kernel. http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=96c2737716d586a218bc795fcb79d2e2b6003081
It seems like this will also be possible in JavaScript: https://wicg.github.io/webusb/
USB support on the LAN or the Internet can be achieved using third-party software. On the example of https://www.eltima.com/products/usb-over-ethernet/, which runs on Linux, MacOs and Windows.
Another company providing USB over network support: https://www.flexihub.com They have a section on limitations though, which is good to keep in mind: https://www.flexihub.com/usb-in-remote-desktop.html#Redirecting
