ASF is just a shelter for providing governance, infra, a legal framework for donations, and credibility to projects that went unprofitable, or weren't intended to be profitable to begin with, such as complements to commercial software. It's a responsible way to dump software you can't realistically maintain going forward, to give it a chance to build up a community by those depending on it, and often accompanied by an initial contribution to ASF. While not every software project is doing well for sure, whether ASF or not, I think the above sentence really misrepresents what ASF is doing (and arguably is doing with a lot of success).