The sentence immediately before the one you quoted is: "Remember how the open source software movement was supposed to be like Woodstock, with everybody sharing and everything free?"
I think the author wants to express that open source has changed a lot from the early days. As far as I remember it, open source originally was driven mainly by students, academics and hobbyists, and by service companies like Red Hat or maybe IBM. Nowadays, many of the larger, successful and enduring open source projects are mainly developed by professional developers working for companies that use the open source software for their commercial products or infrastructure.
I understand the article as making the argument that in the past companies tried to make a business out of the open source project itself while nowadays the open source project is more often a byproduct or a basic infrastructure component for other commercial projects.
I don't think the examples and quotes used by the author are great, but I do think that there is some truth to this argument.
If this article was published in 1998, and we revisited it in 2008, we would have concluded that the author was proven wrong by a landslide.
The idea that someone still thinks this in 2014, and is confident enough in his opinion to publish it, is ridiculous.