HackerNews is open source, right? We share our ideas free of charge here. I'm not even aware of the copyright if any that applies to postings here. And we do it for fun, not for profit. But does it a great book make? Does it even make a magazine?

So I think the point of the article is that while Open Source has its uses, it is not and as far as we can see never will be a wholesale replacement for commercial software.