Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great article, but it did give me the "an elephant is like a rope" feeling—it seems like it's one person's idiosyncratic perspective, some of which I agree with and some I disagree with, and there isn't really much justification for changing my mind about the parts where we differ. But this is exactly Jimmy's writing style and the entire (extremely long) series is like that - it's not meant to be a wikipedia page.
Sorry, I was being too indirect. The whole intro section is weirdly selective about what to include and weave into a single narrative. I lived through that time. There were a lot of other things going on that paint a different picture. Not that the description is definitively wrong or anything, it's just that it is very like the fable of the blind men and the elephant. It's not wrong to say an elephant is like a rope…
Two of your examples begin with GN, which, of course, is a reference to GNU (explicit in the case of GnuCash) and thus a reference to the Free Software movement. Which the author of the piece rather noticeably neglects to talk about at all.