You would get something like a cup of coffee per month. The ecosystem is not really ripe for donation-sustained open source development. GitHub Sponsors feature works a bit better than one time donations. I also like the idea of feature/bug bounties, but I don't know how well they work in practice.

I think the best model if you want to both share the code and make money is to offer commercial version with newest features, and open source a version that's a bit behind. As you publish a new version, you open-source the previous commercial version. This is more of a "source available" model because it actively discourages any community code contributions.

It is still not clear to me how to receive money as founder and maintainer on actual open source project, without resentments from contributors that don't get paid. Doesn't seem fair and has potential to turn into big drama.

This makes a lot of sense. Thank you :-)

Those are complicated matters.

I just have no idea how to do this properly at the moment. I am just hearing people's opinions for now and I'll try and do something that people are generally happy with. On the other hand, it's also true that one cannot please everyone.

To me it's like: "I have done something that I think is cool, let's see what people think about it".

I mentioned that I wanted to do a product out of this and people got emotional, as if it was granted that it's going to be a huge success.

I really wish it was that easy. I think that this is not realistic. It would take a lot of work from a lot of people who need to be paid because they need to pay their own bills to make this into a success. And it still could fail.

I regret having mentioned that I may want to turn this into a product, because it put too much focus on that rather than on the tech that I have developed.