I've been slow walking my FOSS releases because I have no idea how to squeeze some ramen out of it. Though my (dare I suggest) paradigm/category busting project was really hard (for me) to figure out, the end result is simplicity itself. And so therefore trivial to clone, fork, run away.
Possessing the business acumen of plankton, I've been swindled, plagiarized, and mooted a few times before. I don't need much more than ramen money. But not getting anything while others profit from my work, again, would really suck.
The project started as nonprofit with both a business goal (sustain itself by selling online courses) and a philanthropic vision (essentially: increase education access by disrupting the degree market & also open sourcing the code).
A decade later, the nonprofit sold the entire online course business, its brand, and most of its staffing to a for-profit company. It kept the copyright to the open source code, and the remaining staff now use the proceeds of the deal as an endowment to pusue the original philanthropic mission, which includes being a sort of core team for that open source code.
Some details [0]. The online course business is edx.org, the buyer was 2U, the source code is Open edX [1] and the nonprofit started as edX Inc and was renamed to Axim [2] after the sale.
0. https://press.edx.org/2u-inc.-and-edx-complete-industry-rede...
TL;DR: Start off as a nonprofit, build a valuable product, sell the product, and then use the money to continue the nonprofit. YMMV ;)