A profitable, growing, useful, legal, well-loved... failure
    I mean, we are running Access in Wine in X11 on Linux in an isolated
    user account on our server slice that revision controls your Access
    database in git, and we're displaying it using VNC in your web browser
    in flash.

If you asked me to describe the glue-code hackery project I would want to work on least in the whole world, I would have come up with something like that. There are probably uglier projects around, but I don't have the creative masochism to think of them.