Unfortunately, this article seems as empty and uninteresting as the products it's criticizing. The Guardian should ask idlewords to write one for them instead.
For us living inside the feedback loop of the tech world it might be hard to see the relative importance of some of the things. I think he brings up an interesting topic from the perspective of someone living outside of the tech world.
I don't disagree that the topic is important, I just think we have much better critiques being written on that topic regularly, from both inside and outside the tech industry.
Also, the SV reality distortion field hasn't infected all the tech industry. In the companies I worked, nobody was convinced we were changing the world, we're just writing some tools for cash.
I'm not surprised since the day I got into an argument with the guardians senior tech editor and he tried to argue Foss didn't matter and Linux was a fanboy fad...
If you're a software developer that's certainly a valid gripe but what if you're part of the 99.999% of people who use computers but don't run servers? Linux doesn't run your desktop or iOS devices and if Google swapped the kernel on Android the users wouldn't notice.
It might be true in case of the Linux kernel, but I think that most software that one is using is made of many many FOSS libraries. Imagine that all libraries and compilers are either from the OS vendor or proprietary. We would see much less software. People may not run servers, but they are surely using the software running on them - same thing applies. Android has much more FOSS than only kernel, and I'm not talking about AOSP.
Chrome, Safari, OS X, Firefox are standing upon millions of lines of open source code.
Now FOSS is at least a crankshaft of software world. Even if that would be all there is to it, you couldn't say that it doesn't matter.