You do realize that those containers eventually need to be hosted somewhere, right? That somewhere is a server running an operating system. Containers are more a threat to virtual machine OSes than ones that host containers.
Maybe there’s a market for intra container licenses but it’s a harder sell as even there the goal is to go slim.
And that's why people DO pay for red-hat. Peace of mind, whether supported by evidence or not.
However, one the state of the art architecture is micro services, the optimal runtime is kuberentes. Once everyone is on kubernetes hardware will not matter.
Moreover, I would love a cloud based on second hand hardware (which should be much cheaper than 30%).
I’ve wanted to do this for some time, but there’s a lot of cost involved in the space (square footage itself, electricity, cooling) that you can’t cut just by running older stuff. Bandwidth and storage cost the same regardless as well (don’t buy used disks for anything remotely important).
Before the Westmere/Nehalam chips it was a different story, but anything newer is going to sip power and perform well as long as you know you’re not getting “all the perf out of it”.
It’s entirely possible to make a business out of this, but you rely on a customer base that’s inherently cheap and fussy by nature. Not all of them are, but most looking “for a deal” are cheapskates who will milk you dry in time/labor if you let them and you don’t have the margins to deal with that bullshit.
You CAN use Alpine as the hypervisor, but IBM/RedHat/Oracle customers typically don't.
And beyond kubernetes you have function as a service.