[zepto]

> One could have expected the same wrt. proprietary *NIX workstation and server hardware in the 1980s and 1990s, and where are those today?

Server hardware is of course commodity and dominated by Linux.

The high end workstation proprietary workstation market seems pretty alive and dominated but a closed Unix still.

> Embedded brings more trouble because the hardware, far from being a "multi billion dollar" endeavor, is all-too-often entirely undocumented and sloppily hacked together, where a barely workable state is considered "good enough" for shipping. But even there, Linux is easily gaining ground over proprietary OS's.

This is true of ‘embedded’ but phones are not embedded.

> The underlying dynamic is clear enough.

I think this is wishful thinking. Embedded and servers are quite different from phones and workstations.