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.
Many more enterprisey, open-source averse companies still seem to have a woeful lack of understanding of what open source actually is.
Just yesterday I heard someone saying a down side of open source is that you're relying on people's (contributor's) free time for any feature to get done. He somehow overlooked the fact that the largest and most popular open source projects tend to have full time paid contributors (often at Microsoft or Google), or in other cases have an active community with a far better delivery record than just about any enterprise software team.
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.