One of the problems I found with this is that actually taking donations is hard work.
I live in a country completely unsuited to making money from a hobby project on the side. To take donations I'd need to register as self-employed, and pay monthly for social security as long as I'm registered, even if I make no revenue whatsoever in that month. That's an absolutely awful idea for a project just getting started. I'd be losing a very appreciable amount of money, regularly. It'd take lots of effort to have enough support that I'm back to zero, and still not making anything. This is because this is a system made for plumbers, not for people doing rare jobs on the side which might some day grow into something serious.
Apparently the government sort of looks the other way until you start making minimum wage, but that's not a bet I'm comfortable making.
But finally, we (https://overte.org/overte_ev.html) managed. It took us a long time and a lot of effort to get a non-profit registered, and it absolutely required the participation of multiple knowledgeable people. This couldn't have been done as a lone wolf effort.
And after that hurdle of course you have to somehow get people to notice you exist, and convince them to donate. This is unfortunately a tough job for people whose main passion is software development and who threw all their effort into that. Going out there and figuring out how to advertise yourself and how to ask for money is a whole new skill to learn, and a big time and effort investment.
I highly suspect that the reason why libcurl shows up here every week or so is because Steinberg spends about as much time marketing it as writing code and it's clearly working. That project appears to be quite successful in getting donations.
I live in a country completely unsuited to making money from a hobby project on the side. To take donations I'd need to register as self-employed, and pay monthly for social security as long as I'm registered, even if I make no revenue whatsoever in that month. That's an absolutely awful idea for a project just getting started. I'd be losing a very appreciable amount of money, regularly. It'd take lots of effort to have enough support that I'm back to zero, and still not making anything. This is because this is a system made for plumbers, not for people doing rare jobs on the side which might some day grow into something serious.
Apparently the government sort of looks the other way until you start making minimum wage, but that's not a bet I'm comfortable making.
But finally, we (https://overte.org/overte_ev.html) managed. It took us a long time and a lot of effort to get a non-profit registered, and it absolutely required the participation of multiple knowledgeable people. This couldn't have been done as a lone wolf effort.
And after that hurdle of course you have to somehow get people to notice you exist, and convince them to donate. This is unfortunately a tough job for people whose main passion is software development and who threw all their effort into that. Going out there and figuring out how to advertise yourself and how to ask for money is a whole new skill to learn, and a big time and effort investment.
I highly suspect that the reason why libcurl shows up here every week or so is because Steinberg spends about as much time marketing it as writing code and it's clearly working. That project appears to be quite successful in getting donations.