I think the author is implicitly describing the paradigm shift from software and hardware abstractions to service abstractions. We used to make computers by soldering electronics together, then by assembling cases and components, then buying premade servers, then renting cloud capacity, and now we're starting to rent everything as services.

The cloud is about going from capex to opex and the "capex" now is the initial work needed to define your own architectures and stacks for every project (before you get to work on the actual project, i.e. the differentiating part). Amazon is eliminating most of this by offering building block services that fit together with little hassle.

So the challenge for open source is how to move on to this era of service abstraction. It's no longer enough to just provide an NPM package or a configure script.

I think Docker is in a good position to bring us there, but it's currently stuck at the stateless container level. Something needs to evolve so that launching a scalable and auto-maintainable database cluster along with a connected web application cluster is as easy with Docker as it is by renting a few Amazon service.