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Sure, except that there's a race to the bottom; genuinely Free Software will always be cheaper than corporate offerings. The author is not asking for people to compete with e.g. Google and Stripe, but asking for Google and Stripe to deliberately eat the loss when it comes to maintaining free libraries.

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Those companies are not willing to eat the loss though for whatever reason. If the company cannot be invested in it’s product offering there’s no reason a competitor to that product couldn’t successfully rise up. These are not mutually exclusive ideas as a competitor may inspire the company to pay due diligence to the product.

I think these opportunities in giant corporations are exacerbated where your competitor may very well be within the company itself.

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