Ask HN: How do open source companies succeed?

With the recent posts about Docker not being production ready for years now (despite having huge conferences), and RethinkDB shutting down, I'm starting to wonder how an open source company actually makes it.

Docker often says, "you need to decide for yourself if you want to use Docker in production," but I'm betting they knew all of the problems people were going to face. RethinkDB, on the other hand, proactively warned us ahead of time. Is the secret to be ambiguous about how good your software really is?