Patreon currently exists, and a lot of game emulators make use of it. There are a variety of one-off tip mechanisms too (kofi is a popular one). And feature bounties also exist (elementary, for example, uses Bountysource for a lot of their development).
I think all of these things work for certain projects. They work less for mission-critical but un-flashy components (i.e. the "how do we adequately fund OpenSSL?" problem, which was solved by having big money corporates endow funding for it). They work more for user-facing stuff. So they're a good option.
But I don't think they're materially superior to the other models for sustainable OSS (maintainers working on OSS projects as 20% type tasks at their day jobs; companies selling service agreements and hosted versions of OSS components; very large companies simply being public good providers). They're just another part of the puzzle. I do agree it might be slightly more convenient to offer them as part of the public-facing code repo stack.
In this case, it's not clear to me Patreon style development funding would have worked near as well as Redis Labs being a corporate sponsor.
One emulator earning 20k (!) a month is an outlier - it's also not open source.
There's still the marketing issue. If I was to work on open source full time I'd need to get about $2kAUD a month. That kind of income doesn't just happen - you've got to have an extremely popular project first.
Also remember that Patreon's gotta start making money for the VCs soon so there will be user hostile changes eventually.
I think all of these things work for certain projects. They work less for mission-critical but un-flashy components (i.e. the "how do we adequately fund OpenSSL?" problem, which was solved by having big money corporates endow funding for it). They work more for user-facing stuff. So they're a good option.
But I don't think they're materially superior to the other models for sustainable OSS (maintainers working on OSS projects as 20% type tasks at their day jobs; companies selling service agreements and hosted versions of OSS components; very large companies simply being public good providers). They're just another part of the puzzle. I do agree it might be slightly more convenient to offer them as part of the public-facing code repo stack.
In this case, it's not clear to me Patreon style development funding would have worked near as well as Redis Labs being a corporate sponsor.