Can confirm. Have many GitHub stars. They can't pay your bills. Converting stars to money is an interesting process. And not asking for donations, that doesn't work except for the top 0.001% of projects. You have to find a large company that wants support and will pay you the equivalent of a salary as a consulting fee. That's a starting point. If you're more ambitious than that you can try sell the same deal to other companies, personal experience says it's really hard. If you're more ambitious than that you can build a product on top of the open source project or sell an open core version. Also very hard. Then there's the whole VC funded route, I did that. It's a whole other thing not worth discussing here.
Open source sustainability is hard. I do think it comes down to the goals of the project lead and what level of financing it will require to sustain that. I have yet to see anything outside of company sponsorship or VC funding that makes it work. These individual donations don't scale. And even the odd $1k/month on patreon isn't enough. Let's face it, people working on open source are no less skilled than FANG employees, maybe even more so if producing code that's directly consumed. Open source should pay far better but I get the feeling it's still like free saas services on the internet. Each has a nuanced monetization path.
Open source sustainability is hard. I do think it comes down to the goals of the project lead and what level of financing it will require to sustain that. I have yet to see anything outside of company sponsorship or VC funding that makes it work. These individual donations don't scale. And even the odd $1k/month on patreon isn't enough. Let's face it, people working on open source are no less skilled than FANG employees, maybe even more so if producing code that's directly consumed. Open source should pay far better but I get the feeling it's still like free saas services on the internet. Each has a nuanced monetization path.