Isn't that exactly his point? They open source "a ton of work", but not everything; thereby "not competing on code alone". The code of, say, Android or Google Web Toolkit is open source, but the products they build on top (App Store, Gmail/Maps/...) is closed. It only makes sense to open source the parts on which you're not competing.
Uber open sourcing a bunch of periphery services while having benefited from a huge amount of existing open source libraries to build said service is not even slightly the same thing.
There is absolutely nothing here about open sourcing the bits of code that make them the real money. The business logic implementations, that's what I'd be interested in seeing. That's what we're talking about.
Most of these companies open source because they're great strategies for recruitment anyway. Ie, they get something out of open sourcing these periphery services.