If a company wants to improve their margins, then eventually - in the absence of other opportunities, or in an environment that pursues efficiencies - they will reduce costs.
If a market entrant wants to get an edge on existing incumbents, they will look for opportunities to operate at lower costs.
If a non-free component can be rewritten and redistributed at a lower cost, then eventually it will be, either to improve margins or by a market entrant.
This is why I expect that the article's proposition that the marketplace should expect to pay for a component will crumble over time.
That doesn't make sense. It's never cheaper to rewrite a product from scratch yourself unless the pricing is truly messed up. People justify writing and giving away open source code in all sorts of ways but not that it's cheaper than buying.
In the context of the article, the costs I'm referring to are related to a third-party component (integrated easily by default in a framework) that is moving to a pay-sometimes license.
(you also make a very observant hint: total cost of ownership includes hardware-level resource provisioning)
