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Comment by asicsp | Hacker News Reader

I put up a donation link (before GitHub sponsors was introduced) on a repo that had 5k+ stars. Got just one recurring donation (about $1 a month). This wasn't a s/w tool though (tutorials for CLI text processing).

Later, I switched to creating books out of such tutorials. I gave them away for free during launch weeks (but readers could still pay if they wish) and this model worked so well that selling programming ebooks is now my primary source of income.

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It sounded bad, but how much donations that you'll receive don't actually always link to star counts. Stars on GitHub is more like "how many people added this project to their bookmark" than anything else.

That said, as how things goes, there are "high value" projects as well as "low value" ones. If you want to make money out of your open source project, target those "high value" use cases might help. Some fields just don't make a lot's of money even if you tried really hard.

Is the income more than what you would get in a normal software engineering job?

I used to work in a semiconductor industry before. My earnings this year is 25% of what I used to earn 8 years back (literally, not adjusted for inflation). However, this is still more than enough to pay my bills ;)

Keep it up, I am a fan of your ebooks. What were you doing in the semi industry, out of curiosity? ASIC design related ? (Looking at your username)

Thanks for the feedback :)

I was part of a team responsible for design and verification of DSP (digital signal processing) chips. ASIC part of the username refers to both "application-specific integrated circuit" and my college friend circle.

Today you can use sponsored repos to still use GH as your distribution angle but also paywall certain content you create. Perhaps best of both worlds.

Does GH also take care of taxes? Sites like Gumroad are better suited from that aspect - plus there's mailing list, ratings, etc.

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