I don't think that was a viable approach with open source licensing. Donations are proving to be a viable approach. I'm planning on founding a non-profit organization so that companies can properly write off their donations and we can get Canadian grants for developer salaries.
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Contract work associated with the project wouldn't count as funding it. There might be other GrapheneOS developers interested in doing that until we can get more funding but it has never interested me. If I just wanted to get paid for doing work, then I'd be working at Google.
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I am glad that works out for you, but I am unconvinced we can rely on engineers being willing to take < 20% of market rate to power all of open source. I spend less than I make, but I also want to retire early, and I'm not willing to give up on that for age or mkcert.
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The market rate you're talking about largely only applies to people willing to relocate to the US and work for either a major tech company or VC funded startup. It isn't the market rate for the vast majority of developers and most people aren't going to immigrate to the US.
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I live in Canada and it would be easy to get a job in the US and to move there but that doesn't apply to most developers around the world.
People also have families they need to look after including more than their own kids in cultures with more emphasis on extended families.
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Even European developer salaries are nowhere close to the market rate that you're referencing. The only reason that market rate exists is because those US companies don't believe in remote work and wrongly think they get something valuable from their narrow hiring practices.
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In Norway the market rate for Developers flattens at around ~97K a year, and if you do technical manager positions you'd maybe top off at around 135k a year.
It's bewildering how out of sync US developers are around salary compared to ~90% of the market.
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GrapheneOS has a lot of contributors from eastern Europe, India, etc. where the funding we're able to provide goes a long way. Funding developers based in the US isn't really an option for the most part. Maybe if they live off the grid in Montana.
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We funded a US developer who wrote our web installer and the initial sandboxed Play services feature. They're a high school student and getting paid the equivalent of 60k/year is a lot of money to them. Currently no way that I could fund them to work full time post graduation.
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For comparison:
60K/year is what an entry level position as a Software Engineer would be in Norway, with a Masters degree.
It's also above the median salary range in Norway as a whole.
Amazing and lovely that you funded their work :)
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If someone becomes a regular contributor then I look into getting them a workstation and an up-to-date development phone (Pixel 6) so they have more than the emulator. If they're working on it a lot then I try to work out funding for their work too.
I could be funding a lot more than I am due to built up Bitcoin and Monero which has gone up in value substantially but I don't really want to burn through all that money. I'm trying to keep the spending fairly in line with the donations that are coming into the project.