I think the comment is meant to claim that while they contribute to these open source projects, the end goal is the ability to control those new arms of the emerging market to an extent. Kind of like what's happened with steam where it's been around for so long , has such a large community and quantity of content, that any similar platform that comes along is going to be at a serious disadvantage. Even large scale companies don't even know how to compete with steam properly so far.

If the same thing happens to the Linux community within the next 10 years or so due to valves contributions. That could be not necessarily bad, but a serious change to the Linux culture. Open source culture could take a hit. Gabe won't live forever, and he has a unique understanding of " you don't fuck with the open source community, you work with them ". Once he's gone, whoever takes over could take advantage of their foothold in the open source community, or at least try to. That would probably be bad.