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Donations are not profits - lots of authors ask for donations.
Carbonite started as a pay for use addon, meaning that it was originally a business - and therefore the whole walmart reference. They put time and effort into creating this addon for money. They went through expenses for that business. The authors now update it, I assume, because they love their pet project that they spent a lot of time creating. I would like to see another person create the same functions Carbonite has without using Carbonite for a building block - and see how much time they put into that project. I admit, I know nothing about programming - so hopefully I'm wrong and that is easy to do.
Maintaining it, I assume, doesn't take as much time - it is creating and making sure everything works well together. What Rythal did was spend a "few nights" as you say - as I remember his post, he didn't get much sleep on those nights as he spent time working on the addon. Lastly, the developers haven't said "ohh it takes forever to update because everything is so complex" they have said "we have lives, Carbonite is not the forefront of our life - up until a few days ago, we didn't even know there was an update that broke it. We will look to get an update out tonight." and then they continued to correct extra issues.
There is a very big difference between the picture you paint - and reality.
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