There are much more mature and stable examples to point at for community-supported open source. Successful open source generally doesn't happen because of direc

There are much more mature and stable examples to point at for community-supported open source. Successful open source generally doesn't happen because of direct dollar contributions, but because companies that depend on the projects decide to employ the project maintainers, or assign their existing employees to fix & improve critical projects. For example, I know that at least $100k/month is being poured into Ember right now. There is no visible patreon page to point to, because it's all employee salaries. But multiple very-big companies -- in tech, finance, and media -- are using and depending on Ember and are paying their employees and contractors directly to keep making it better. That estimate is certainly lower than the true number, because I'm only counting the group of people whose time is 100% allocated to Ember. There are a couple orders of magnitude more people who get to allocate some of their paid working time, and that group adds up to quite a lot more money.