How to make money on a pet project through the donation mechanism?

Question

open source

For the third year in my free time, I have been writing a C++ library designed, in particular, for generating text parsing machines according to a given syntax. Recently I realized that the work is coming to an end and I wanted to somehow introduce this thing to the world. I don't know yet if anyone needs it, but in any case, there is a desire to get some money from it. I do not want to make the library paid, I prefer the scheme of putting the code in open source and getting money through donations.
Here, in fact, there is a place for questions:
Has anyone tried to make money on their open source projects through the donation system? If so, could you briefly share your experience? Perhaps someone can provide links to their publications in connection with such an experience? Or, perhaps, someone just saw similar publications?
In terms of details, the following topics are primarily of interest:
1. How was the project formalized? What payment systems were used to receive donations? How difficult is it to resolve legal issues?
2. In cases where more people were involved in the project (what the hell is not joking, suddenly some kind of community arises), how was the issue of sharing donations resolved?

Answer 1

Vladimir, here is the flow of my thoughts on this topic .