I think you're making the right decision. Open-source is extremely difficult to make even a living wage off of - the number of people who do is orders of magnitude smaller than those who make a living off of commercial software.
I hate serving shitty Google ads. They are also not a stable source of income and the revenue is low in my case. It's time for me to move on.
However, like being a social media "influencer" (e.g. Twitch streamer), it requires a lot of both hard work and luck, has a limited amount of "capacity", and isn't a viable source of income for most people.
So are you saying it’s even possible? I wish to learn at least one option to do it. Few is even better. How at all you can realistically make living this way?
Ok, not living , just partial income. Ok not partial. Some income?
I am not making fun of I honestly look some way .
I understand that if you maintain 10 years some essential part of essential software project then people eventually come to you for consulting or will pay you to shift this part toward their requirements.
But other then that? Like can you write useful free software program and really have some money from it ?
All of these models are very hard to get working (e.g. the donations model requires that you have a very large number of people interested in your work who are generous with their money, kind of like Twitch streaming), but they can work. They're not an option for the majority of programmers, though.