He seems to be suggesting that the only economic model for software development is to sell it as a product. That might make sense if your business is selling software. The rest of us are in the business of designing websites, running universities and large enterprises, selling widgets etc. In other words, our business is making other kinds of stuff or just in providing services. In the course of running that business we need to use software. If there's free stuff (especially stuff that can be freely customized to fit my business) then great. If we improve it, we might give it back to the community and everyone benefits. Well, everyone, except that poor sap who's trying to sell the commercial software that doesn't benefit from the stream of incremental improvements that come from the community. Or maybe they've still got a better solution than the FOSS product. That's excellent and if they make money, more power to them! But there's nothing broken or wrong with the FOSS model and the writer doesn't offer much evidence to support his argument other than an anecdote about how Ubuntu from four years ago (!) didn't work for him. Sheesh.