The analysis has some interesting data, but it is not filled with much clear thinking in regard to the relationship between businesses and FOSS. Any venture capitalist or FOSS programmer should note that successful FOSS-tied companies are not selling software. They are giving away software that will help them leverage some other competence. Whatever anyone tells you, you should understand that you can't make money by selling open source software.

RedHat sells support (and ease-of-use), not software. Google sells advertising/information, not software. Canonical sells support (and ease-of-use), not software (although they are trying some lite versions of Google play-store and advertising models). Jolla tried to sell a layer of software over the top of OSS --- it is failing. Synology sells support and ease-of-use for their NAS.

Now, clearly, FOSS programmers must get paid ... but they are getting paid by a company that is not selling the software. They are selling something else. Some things to watch out for in this model are questions like:

Will RedHat stay successful? There is some doubt. Certainly things like virtualization and containers are decreasing RH's value (helping to maintain "production" systems). Sadly, they are programming themselves out of their own business model. Canonical similarly ... although they seem to be more aware of this (they are building Snappy to make their app-store viable). The progress here in FOSS will slowly eat away companies like Nebula (already gone?) and CoreOS (writing is on the wall).

And in terms of positive notes for FOSS on the business horizon: Hardware. There's a lot of room to fund FOSS along with hardware. Intel realizes this. Samsung too. Most hardware companies right now are just "users" and "abusers" (AllWinner). However, when companies like AllWinner and others figure this out and open up their environment and fund FOSS layers for their hardware environment: Wow!