One of the observations I have had is supporting opensource on donations is not a model that works long term. It could have been true back in the 90s and early 2000s. But these days the tech shift happens at very fast rate. So if your opensource product or concept is successful in the market, you cannot compete with another product or a startup cloning you idea on donations.
As coding and software development is getting democratized, if you have a concept that definitely has a market even though you are first to market. Other developers will build similar product and saturate the market, essentially diluting your value. For instance, I have been tracking Heroku style deployment tools in the market, there is like tons of opensource platform doing the same thing built by startup as well as individual developers. Same for opensource airtable clones.
As coding and software development is getting democratized, if you have a concept that definitely has a market even though you are first to market. Other developers will build similar product and saturate the market, essentially diluting your value. For instance, I have been tracking Heroku style deployment tools in the market, there is like tons of opensource platform doing the same thing built by startup as well as individual developers. Same for opensource airtable clones.