Yeah I phrased that poorly. I think open-source is good for companies financially because it makes a more valuable product for end-users. And I wish THAT was the focus. What is typically the focus (although admittedly, is not really the focus in this article) in presentations trying to get companies to do open-source is, "look - people will do a bunch of free work for you". I think that's both unlikely and beside the point. I didn't mean to say that the fact that there IS a financial ROI should be irrelevant or a negative.

For instance: I gladly pay more for a book directly from O'Reilly because they don't have DRM on their ebooks. It's not that they're getting any direct freebies or savings from not doing DRM, it's that I look at the freer-as-in-libre product and think it's just a more valuable thing for me to buy. Same with software.