How to Open Source and Not Starve

Other than the persistent quest for how to make money by giving your work away --- another inherent contradiction of open source is the idea that a "license" will protect your work.

A license isn't worth much unless you have the ability to defend it. And defending it also requires --- money.

Oops!

Recently, I've been trying to figure out how to finance software and hardware that's actually useful to everyday people. The sentiment clearly resonated with HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47713454

but when I tried asking around how I could finance a useful OS app, I didn't get much of an answer. That's why I spent some days on research to understand how the FOSS projects that I enjoy and rely on are financing their operations. And how well that appears to work (or not).