The key word was products, i.e. making a living from building tools for other developers.

There are many more developer-run companies today than there were 10 years ago and the number will continue to grow. There have never been more opportunities to do that than right now.

AFAIK, it's actually the opposite — only recently is this a hard thing, with the proliferation of OSS development tools.

OSS is an opportunity. It's not about the software; it's about the services and the ecosystem. There are a lot of people making money from Wordpress plugins, themes, and development.