The author objectifies and distorts FOSS quite a bit in order to shape it into a target for a critique of capitalism. You can criticizes anything as being soul

The author objectifies and distorts FOSS quite a bit in order to shape it into a target for a critique of capitalism. You can criticizes anything as being soulless if you remove the soul! FOSS runs on human values. As an analogy, if your village doesn't have good drinking water, and BigWaterCo isn't doing anything about it, you get together build a well, and then you try to keep BigWaterCo from taking it over. It's that simple. Not every single actor in the vast ecosystem acts from those motivations, but that's why the movement is there. (With the addition of: Don't wait until the water is bad.) Many people get paid to work on FOSS, while others volunteer or treat it as a hobby. It may or may not bring money or "social capital" (a term used to try to frame "respect" as "money" and any group of cooperating people as an overly materialistic economy). The author's perspective is shallow and cynical. I imagine them seeing, "Built a well" on a villager's resume and thinking they finally understand why they went to all that trouble. It's to look good, and turn that into money! No, it's to have clean water to drink, now and in the future. But I'm just your typical member of the "able, white, cis, hetero male" category, so feel free to view my answer through the lens of whatever stereotypes are supposed to apply to that category. (Sorry, couldn't resist!)