Why you expect too much from open source

I think this article hurts itself by assuming a pure market scenario: different firms are competing with each other, some adopting an open source strategy, while others pursue a closed source strategy.

That's not what's happening, however: open source doesn't just involve the market-based production of goods (e.g. databases), but also elements of non-market (i.e. voluntary) production.

Mixing this up with for-profit business models has a number of side effects, which the author ignores. Look at Red Hat and Canonical: they are market competitors, yet they contribute to the same Linux kernel and system.

If one of the distributors and service providers dies, a much more smooth transition can happen to it's more successful competitors, since they are using variants of the same tool.

This is exactly the sort of properties I'd be looking for in infrastructure technology - which is the exact kind of thing that open source has become omnipresent in.

So: no, I don't think putting a lot of emphasis on open source is bad.