It baffles me how unreasonable some of the commenters are. Intel is trying to stop bleeding money and are cutting everything that's not core to their business. Side projects like clear Linux not being on the chopping block would be such a slap in the face of every employee that lost their job in the last year.
If you don't have these kinds of projects you eventually don't have market share in DCs. It only gets easier for purchasers like me to say no Intel when they haven't provided Intel specific optimizations so viewing that as side project or donation is misguided and not consistent with how Linus describes their relationship.
Which would be a valid point if they were competitive with AMD but that's not the case right now. Not having competitive CPUs is what is killing Intel in the DC.
Stuff like clear linux is sprinkles on the sunday, if you don't even have the ice cream it doesn't matter how good your sprinkles are.
You are saying they should leave DCs and never go back? To be blunt they could never explain their prices without sprinkles and no one is going to care when they are back at AMDs level if they burned that in the interim. Selling for a dollar less than AMD is not a model Intel can sustain.
Clear Linux itself is afaik irrelevant it is a vehicle for getting their code for optimizations developed and out to make FUDish claims that maybe an AMD won't be as good for your workloads, etc.