A project I'm working on, reiserfs, may fail for this reason as well. You must exist with your neighbours and bring them along for the ride - both Sun Tzu and Machiavelli both agreed on this point. Berlin, GGI and reiserfs all fill a void that must be filled, but maybe not by these particular projects because they offended the sensibilities of the narrow-minded establishment. Some projects never even get off the drawing board simply because it is too hard to write them without either a dedicated team of clever people with some form of an idea of what they are going to achieve. These sort of projects need either lots of people or they need a few core employed people with innate or learnt project management and software engineering skills.
Some projects choose inadvisable or just plain wrong tools.
OpenBSD for a project or two of the living dead. Great software engineers, but their visibility in the open source world is near zero. There's plenty of NetBSD users, but they have no real visibility in the open source world, particularly at a commercial level. I think that this may have been a contributing factor. Maybe that's something a successful software project needs.