Until just now I had never heard of this team and their contribution to FreeCAD. Reading the article I think it outlines what they did and it sounds excellent.

As far as their success or failure of achieving their aims, I don't have any information to make a judgement either way.

I will say that making a business out of open source software is not something for the faint of heart and not something that has a track record of success, let alone a documented one. Mostly it seems to follow the pattern: "How do you make a small fortune from open source?" "Start with a large fortune."

I say this as a quarter century user, developer and advocate of open source solutions.