Does OSS always have to end up as an sass to make profit?Not always there are some technical oriented products where the originators set up shop as a consultancy and offer expertise in the technology. The Dojo Toolkit is a good example of such an arrangement. Where you can hire Site-Pen to develop web applications with the technology the founders created. It is probably a less lucrative model but it is another way that revenue is generated around the OSS model.
As for the OP's question about success, I am pretty sure the founders of Pentaho are doing pretty well. Maybe not Google well, but I would assume that they are fairly wealthy individuals now. Granted they have played down their OSS roots on their site, but they still do offer the community edition.
