Read the sentence in its entirety, dropping the parenthetical comment:

> If you follow the above, you’ll see the supposed “free rider” problem is simply a natural consequence of open source being free as in beer: it’s not a problem to be solved, it’s a consequence to be embraced and exploited.

"to be embraced and exploiting" is referring to the consequence, not to the open source developers.

What the author is trying to say is that a large segment of the users of open source software are using it because it is free as in beer. That sounds like a problem, and it is if you are narrow-mindedly thinking about how to monetize the open source software directly. But there are other ways for open source developers to take advantage of the opportunity.