Wait, WHAT?!
This is not an accidental negation, he refers to it in the rest of the paragraph.
This person must be trolling or testing bullshit arguments to see which ones sort of fly, for use in whatever bullshit-oriented job they do.
The fact that this got a lot of exposure should serve as a warning sign though. The FSF is vulnerable and struggling to maintain relevance. Both the re-hiring and the controversy around RMS illustrate that in my opinion: whenever the discourse gets diverted away from Free software, it's a distraction they can ill afford.
Either they didn't know that this would happen or they wanted it to happen. In any case, they're now even more vulnerable to these kinds of hit pieces, and I'm afraid the RMS issue could generate enough public interest for larger publications to execute successful strikes against the idea of Free software itself.
What is the "much evidence" which the author refers to? I'm genuinely interested; if anyone here knows of any such evidence, please, tell us! What is it?
My personal experience is the exact opposite; I have not personally found closed-source libraries to offer better quality in general. Of course, there is a lot of junk out there which is open source. But most of the small number of rock-solid, tried-tested-and-true code libraries which I am aware of are open source.
My worst experience has been with a proprietary rack mount appliance. The closed source software was absolute garbage. It wasn't even a library, it's even more fundamental. It was network equipment, you know, a problem domain that didn't change significantly in the last 20 years. Crap closed source software exists, it just has a harder time propagating because it fails to bring in money. Meanwhile any random FOSS project can last a human lifetime, assuming it is archived properly.
Which is why FUD like this is so dangerous. It makes sense in PHB land where they don't understand that a programmer doesn't just use the first hit for a given functionality, but investigates whether it's actually worthwhile to use.
Just thinking out loud. Anyways, I think you may have identified what the author of the piece had in mind.
There is so much disinformation from an apparently knowledgeable person, that it has to be intentional. No way an ignorant person would create all those falsehoods in the article by a random chance of being mistaken.
No, there's no way someone can be that stupid. This is intentional evil.
Unfortunately, my experience in various industries leads me to disagree.