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That's called business competition. Stay in business by delivering greater value.

It's likely the maintainer is in the best position to start a company about the product to deliver more features faster and at higher quality along with more inherent trust.

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As someone being in a similar situation, it's a really difficult business model. Unlike many other business models with a natural moat (i.e. by virtue of having all the data, being deeply integrated into organisational processes, etc), commercialising open source is a struggle because simply justifying making money already requires constant improvement.

Almost all businesses require constant improvement to be commercially viable. This is the common scenario.

Natural moats are rare and highly sought after and fought for, and is actually much harder to build than a typical business based on product value.

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