> Scott McNealy said early on that retreating to the Data Center was where companies went to die. That is a striking thought. I wonder how (if at all) does it

> Scott McNealy said early on that retreating to the Data Center was where companies went to die. That is a striking thought. I wonder how (if at all) does it apply to open source. GNU/Linux for example always had strong aspirations for desktop [1], yet this never materialized. The only place where Linux (but not GNU) succeeded in a big way outside data-center is becoming a golden-standard hardware abstraction layer for CPEs, Android and to some extent other embedded computing devices. Now with Linux ABI being embraced first by Joyent in SmartOS [2], and now by Microsoft [3], GNU/Linux is pretty much all-in data-center nowadays. Does that mean it too, is going the way of DEC and Sun in due course? [1] See "Year of the Linux Desktop" motto from 1998 is pretty much every year thereafter. [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9257130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9257130 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11388418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11388418