Thanks for sharing this. We are living in interesting times. It would be impossible for me to recommend a donation-based funding approach for software developers who are hoping to receive enough money to make it their full time job, as that is a road paved with disappointment for almost everyone.
For most open source / freeware developers, I'm not sure this is a big problem, as few are really trying to generate full time work revenue from their projects. For those that are, some of the other platforms provide some clues as to how to make it work.. YouTube seems to have spawned an entire new class of workers, who produce enough content and fans that a few of them are actually getting rich off it. But whether coders could brand themselves well enough for this and whether users would be willing to support them in a similar way seems unlikely.
Open source developers also have a really sticky problem to solve, which is that by nature most medium to large open source projects are a collaboration of many coders, whose participation waxes and wanes. Thus figuring out how to divide up donations and funding is a difficult problem, that has yet to be solved well. For single-author open source projects, the path is easier.
The easiest path for open source single-author projects is to be useful to large companies and get funding from a small number of them. This seems by far the smoothest path to being well paid for open source work.
