> Wow, paying himself $150k after tax from donations! That's wildly more successful than I would have guessed.

Why? The salary Andrew Kelley would likely attract at a corporate is much higher than that. If you want sustainable open-source infrastructure then someone, somewhere will have to pay for it. It feels crummy to attempt to pressure people into taking super low salaries (and probably results in higher rates of burnout).

> Damn... really? More than $170k/year from Github Sponsors? That's got to be the most successful Github Sponsor income ever right?

Building programming languages is hard? Rust had something like ~10 Mozilla developers working on it for ~10 years (that's something upwards of $20-30mn in investment).