I thought basically the same thing when I heard about it, but from a different angle: what would happen to VC investments if NPM imploded? Some stability for these companies is valuable.

I'm not sure of some of the implications of this article though; open source and money are not inextricably connected. While open source may be a loss leader in some cases, it does not need to be. All of what we now consider open source descends from a time when it was considered radical to think it was possible to make money from open source.