There are many routes to success, having a dedicated team that is co-owner of the project is one way of achieving that, but just like any other route it is not a guarantee.
'going nowhere' and 'being a regular business' are not the same.
Ha, I wrote OpenEMR when I was 16 along with a few of my high school friends in Connecticut. One guy's mom was a doctor, and wanted an EMR system, so we whipped one up in PHP over a summer.
My first startup, and I've since forgotten about it, but I'm glad to see that OpenEMR is still alive. The codebase looks nothing like it originally did, but I guess that's a positive for open source. (Who really trusts some high school kid's PHP code, anyhow?)