tl;dr:"I now have six amazing clients, and I’m making an amount of money equivalent to my Google total compensation package, which proves the thesis that it’s possible to be a professional maintainer earning rates competitive with the adjacent market for senior software engineers... I’m sharing details about my progress to hopefully popularize the model, and eventually help other maintainers adopt it, although I’m not quite ready to recommend anyone else drop everything to try this just yet."
tl;dr:To successfully fund an OS project, a company needs to: (1) Pay the maintainers, not people external to the project. (2) Pay "real money" i.e. what they could make as senior engineers. (3) Pay for maintenance, not features or support. (4) Keep paying and assess performance at contract renewal time.