Yeah, so looking at the GitHub Cabal's secret price list, 25,000 GH stars will put you at $102k / yr, so shoot for that.
Seriously though, the fact that you're asking about GitHub stars is... telling. There's plenty of popular repo's on GitHub that I'd refuse to pay any money to, but more to the point, GitHub is a terrible customer experience because it's not for selling software to people, thus the only thing 'GH stars' tells us is... the number of people that have starred a particular repo.
For a purely open-source project, look at OpenSSL. It's probably in production in a significant amount of the entire internet. But until Heartbleed came along and it came to light that the OpenSSL project was severely underfunded, it was limping along with little sponsorship.
Red Hat is probably the most famous open source business, but unfortunately, if you look at their practices, they're abiding by the letter of the GPL, but not entirely the spirit, which they've decided is necessary from a business perspective, so if you're looking to make a lifestyle business based on your open-source project, the question to you is: how comfortable would you be with a lifestyle business based on an entirely proprietary project?
Is this a pipe dream? Chances are, yeah. But do dreams come true? Sometimes :)
Seriously though, the fact that you're asking about GitHub stars is... telling. There's plenty of popular repo's on GitHub that I'd refuse to pay any money to, but more to the point, GitHub is a terrible customer experience because it's not for selling software to people, thus the only thing 'GH stars' tells us is... the number of people that have starred a particular repo.
For a purely open-source project, look at OpenSSL. It's probably in production in a significant amount of the entire internet. But until Heartbleed came along and it came to light that the OpenSSL project was severely underfunded, it was limping along with little sponsorship.
Red Hat is probably the most famous open source business, but unfortunately, if you look at their practices, they're abiding by the letter of the GPL, but not entirely the spirit, which they've decided is necessary from a business perspective, so if you're looking to make a lifestyle business based on your open-source project, the question to you is: how comfortable would you be with a lifestyle business based on an entirely proprietary project?
Is this a pipe dream? Chances are, yeah. But do dreams come true? Sometimes :)