How APL is proprietary? Anybody can implement it, and there are opensource implementations available. The 100k/CPU price the author referred to was about the high performance database integrated with a vector processing language engine.
It is not about commodity. cgroups-like functionality was available in many opensource OSes for years (e.g. FreeBSD jails), but was easily dismissed by majority as worthless. This is exactly what the author was talking about referring to Lady Gaga -- the modern programming community is driven by fashion regardless of how good or bad the current fashionable technology is. I do not find it surprising however, as it is a direct result of the order of magnitude growth of the programmer's population, which is behaviorally much more close to the general population currently that it used to be.