(A bit of an aside) This represents an interesting 1-person 'business model': make yourself useful (and known to be useful) working on an open source project. Once established, use kickstarter to gain some full/part-time funding. The amount of pre-kickstarter work involved to get there obviously wouldn't make a good business case in purely utilitarian terms, but it seems like an appealing way to have a chance at gett…
My problem is that I am one step further removed from the money - I write "end-user free software", that's even harder to get companies to pay for than an open source library. The Magit users among a company's employees might be among those wasting the least time on version control and make fewer costly mistakes than others, but while that benefits the employer it is not something that is being measured.
So the money has to come from the developers themselves. I am very grateful that so many of them have decided to back my campaign. I also think that the Emacs community is being very nice with its maintainers. The vast majority of users are very respectful when they need your help and they are generally a nice bunch.
I don't know if a second campaign in one years time would succeed though - so it's unclear whether this could become a successful "1-person business model". I certainly hope it does - not just for me. It would be nice if fewer authors of unique free software projects had to throw in the towel eventually and move on writing "real world software" - you know things that scale.
I actually did try to get some companies to pay for my work. I hoped that Github, Gitlab, or Atlassian would see this as an opportunity to gain some goodwill in the free software world, but that didn't work out unfortunately.
The Gitlab CEO actually replied within a few hours and seemed like a nice guy (after sending my message but before getting his rejection I had actually booked a flight to go see him at a meetup), but he was not interested in sponsoring my work. Atlassian send me a canned response, and Github did not respond at all.
Nor did its CEO who actually is (was?) an Emacs users who had forked Magit at one point. I can't really blame him for that, the message probably was just drowned in a lot of other email.
But I would have hoped that those companies would show some interest. Maybe now that its users have shown with their wallets that they believe in Magit, maybe now that changes. If you work for one of these companies, or a less known competitor, and have anything to say in such matters, you are certainly welcome to support me now!