Comment by tonymet

they have a lot of options for sales. they can sell their service and run a not-for-profit enterprise.

surviving on online donations is extremely rare. In their case, they are not getting that many impressions, so $1-$5 donations won't cover their expenses. Think of how expensive even a single customer like Gentoo would be if they fully migrated -- how many Gentoo contributors would have to contribute money to cover Gentoo hosting.

I'm sure they have a sales pipeline planned, and similar to Facebook, they don't want to kill the buzz with sales before they build their audience.