My two cents: Open source displaced a lot of propriatery stacks. When you're running commercial software at $$$$ per license, the customers basically have to

My two cents: Open source displaced a lot of propriatery stacks. When you're running commercial software at $$$$ per license, the customers basically have to stick to whatever hardware is explicitly supported. And the vendors are going to be narrow there. Fewer platforms keep support costs down, and prevent exposure to uncompetitive corners of the market. As long as $expensive_product is only officially supported for x86, nobody needs to know it's riotously unperformant on ARM in ways that will require wholesale rewrites to fix. When it's all open stuff, nothing stops people from compiling it for ARM, RISC-V, and hell 65C816, letting the market choose which platform fits their needs best. For many audiences it might not be "maximum performance under cost-no-object hardware"; it might be "what's the cheapest way to serve a fixed N workload units per month, when you include the purchase cost, electricity cost, rack-space rental cost, etc." As a second-order effect, I expect removing license cost from the equation also impacts the metrics people care about. When the software price is the dominant aspect of the bill, nobody's going to make much of a case of "we can save 55 of the annual cost up front by using cheaper good-enough hardware" or "we'll save 1% per month on the energy bill".