It sounds like the author is reacting to the flood of ooh-shiny iPhone app kiddies that have captured a lot of media attention lately, but I don't think these are the people who would have been attracted to Linux anyway. And I don't think it's fair to lump all this together into an amorphous concept of "Linux" when the problem is a bit more nuanced.

Linux, as a kernel and as a platform, has matured, but there's still plenty of opportunity for new people to explore new territory. Some of it may be extending the existing "boring" infrastructure, which the author seems to blame for turning developers away, but nobody should feel restricted to working on those things. There's still a lot of exciting application development to be done, and as an added bonus, if the platform needs improvements to support your application, you're encouraged to contribute those as well.

Also, if you want a counterpoint, the Arch Linux developers page certainly makes me feel old already: http://www.archlinux.org/developers/