I'm not sure what you're implying. He makes $20k a month from Patreon. That is an extremely comfortable amount of income.

Vue.js is one of the most used JavaScript frameworks out there.

If this was a commercial project, his income would be magnitudes higher.

Yes, $20k a month is comfortable. But is it appropriate given the popularity of Vue and considering how many organizations profit from it?

Now, if you scale this down to a framework that has half or a quarter of that popularity. When do you reach the point where it isn't comfortable at all anymore? And does that still seem appropriate?

> If this was a commercial project, his income would be magnitudes higher.

If it was a commercial project I imagine there would likely need to be other staff involved, and adoption would be lesser. Whether that ends up being more or less money for him in specific in the end (or whether the project/company would survive) is not without question, in my mind.

The argument you make is quite popular. I'd say adoption would only be lower because there's competition that's also MIT licensed. And if that wasn't there, every framework author would be better off (e.g. in a public-private licensing scenario).

It will be hard to find evidence for both sides I guess. So it boils down to being kind of a gamble: adoption or fair compensation — you can't have both.

This looks like a race to the bottom to me, which is what the data presented in the article seems to support.

> If this was a commercial project, his income would be magnitudes higher.

Not necessarily. I would expect part of the reason it's one of the most used is because it's non-commercial.

I do agree it's not fair compensation, though.

If this were a commercial product, he owned the company and wasn’t an employee, and he could still get the widespread adoption that open source can bring.

I might suggest for a company to use VueJS since it is open source and donate but I’m never going to suggest that a company bases its product on Telerik components.

How do we know that $20k/month is all that he's making? It sounds like that's just one of his income streams.

That's not all, as he's pulling revenue from multiple sources with Patreon being only one of them.Even with extremely conservative estimates he should be making at least $500K. However the point of my previous post was that one needs to take his project to stratosphere for it to generate anything substantial using this model.

Is Patreon his only source of income?

on edit: I should have probably asked one the child comments, but this is ok here as well.

His donation amount is not bad but if you think about it like a salary; it's kind of low considering how well known he is in the industry.

> how well known he is in the industry.

That is also part of his compensation.

But you can’t eat goodwill.

You can eat the food that is bought with the fees that can be easily gained from speaking and consulting.

Or, phrased differently, from working another job.

Or, phrased differently, he's already doing whatever he's doing, and $20k/month is just one income stream.

I'm a developer who's presented at conferences. I don't consider that "another" job, but rather, part of this job. And I don't have any monthly donation income coming in at all.

A job you could only get by having the reputation in the first place.

That's hardly another job. It's completely based on Vue. I know if I needed an expert on it and he was available that he'd probably be my first choice.