Did you read he article? Simoms bought a license from the closed source academic authors, and gave them to every academic institution in the world (but not amateurs). No one is paying for it (except Simons), so there is no voting with wallets happening here. Simone picked a winner. Academics don't really have a lot of funding , and purchase decisions cone from administrative boards (like the folks who buy Enterprise Windows+Office deployments), not the users.
See also: tragedy of the commons, and free riders. People like not paying for things, regardless of quality.
> Simoms bought a license from the closed source academic authors, and gave them to every academic institution in the world
The article only mentions academics from North America in this quote [1]. Where did you find the information about "every academic institution in the world"?
As an academic in Europe I feel quite upset when an academic project is region-locked. Simons Foundation has lost quite a bit a respect from me for this. (My original respect for them was for their frequent posting of lectures on YouTube, which is something more institutions should do throughout the world.)
[1]: "In the backroom during a coffee break, David Eisenbud told me that it had already been decided that they were going to just fund Magma by making it freely available to all academics in North America."
See also: tragedy of the commons, and free riders. People like not paying for things, regardless of quality.