OK, so it’s tough out there, what did you expect? Yet a FOSS start-up needs to get customers and big corporates need innovative ideas like never before. We really “get” global competition now and if we aren’t selling something useful or making it in the most efficient way then someone else is going to be eating from our Bento box.
Clichés aside for a moment, consider this; start-ups use open source software to bootstrap themselves -- they have an idea, they have a rough guess at product-market fit and they work on a prototype. Guess what, they may have misjudged the demand. They think, in fact they’re certain, there’s a market out there for their product/service but they just don’t know for sure exactly what is going to be required to make it a viable, buyable product.