As the article points out, most important "FOSS" is funded entirely by corporations these days anyways. Lots of well-maintained software libraries have people working for tech companies who's jobs are to work on that stuff.

The money hose, combined with free or subsidised services, is a control mechanism that lets big tech companies control the OSS ecosystem. Projects they want to promote will get the money spigot.

That's just how things work. The alternative would be to either make libraries all closed-source and have paid licenses (and have far fewer o them), or have software libraries be government funded with grants or whatever (another subsidy to tech companies). Capitalism has companies that provide services, there's no system that would make it not benefit them more than they benefit the software. Most software doesn't even have much of a use outside of services implemented by companies.

I think something else they don't mention is that open source software is also a good way to not pay for people's job training. I see lots of positions that require experience with different frameworks and stuff. It reduces costs and training redundancy that way as much as it's about making companies' products more valuable.

This is fine when the project in question is directly funded by a tech multinational. Less so when the project is something specialised, a little bit niche, or inventive, and therefore not financed by a gigantic corporation.

Smaller companies contribute money as well. But I'm sure they're right that there are lots of companies that use free software libraries without sponsoring them, which is kinda breaking an unspoken rule.