What about it?

I don't think kernel ABI is compatible between versions.

So unless the vendor distributes the source for the driver interfacing with the machine, it shouldn't run on modern releases.

We're not talking about drivers, we're talking about applications. You can take an application compiled back in 2005 and run it on a modern Linux machine, as long as the machine architecture is the same.

I assumed the machine would require a custom driver. Else it's extremely unlikely the app was broken as early as 2006 (so on Windows Vista) without their research group having some sort of support contract. Software would have been barely 4 years old at that point.