I feel like to succeed here, you need to make an offering that can immediately run either a mainline Linux kernel or a totally open fork (with the intent of get

I feel like to succeed here, you need to make an offering that can immediately run either a mainline Linux kernel or a totally open fork (with the intent of getting committed to mainline) and making sure all the major toolchains can build and run on it. Unless there's a minimum friction to migrate, most companies won't make the effort even if they can save a few $100 per server. It takes me back to Intel's VLIW attempt with Itanium/EPIC. Even when they got compilers up to snuff, too many high end tasks (video encoding) either required special instructions or were written in assembly that couldn't easily be ported to EPIC instructions.