While I don’t like it all that much either, I see the necessity. I’ve tried (without success, because I was the lone voice in the wilderness) for more than 2 years to restart development. Fritzing was about to die. Parts update was broken on Win7, the 0.9.3b libraries are getting so old they are no longer supported on some Linux distros, I expect newer Mac versions have issues (there is a fix that had been committed more than 2 years ago for a Mac problem of some kind that will be in 0.9.4 pre release when the Mac and Windows binaries get published again.) When something in Fritzing gets too old or too insecure to be allowed anymore Fritzing would have (and may still if the new release fails for some reason) die. It took the CTO of the fab to take an interest and get development restarted. The sad fact is the code base is complex, and the only way forward is likely professional developers. There isn’t a rush of people offering pull requests with fixes on github (which is what I found, a lot of talk, but no concrete action), that might change if it becomes obvious Fritzing development is alive again, but it hasn’t in the last couple of years and I see no current evidence it is going to, since the push to start development again started. I have made a couple of fixes to bugs (that with some help from @KjellM to correct my style mistakes 
) made it in to 0.9.4 prerelease, so I can say from experience the code base is complex and almost totally without comments. Fixing bugs takes a lot of time tracing code with gdb, because I don’t understand the code. I believe that is true of everyone restarting development, as far as I know there is no one from the original developers still involved (although I could be wrong here.) Think of this as a fee for the easy button. You are still welcome to download the source from github and compile it (having done so several times trying to restart development, I can testify that is very painful!) The donation helps pay for the build infrastructure which had to be rebuilt from the ground up because the original is as far as I know gone. It hopefully will also pay for Fritzing to move forward, otherwise it is going to die and I for one don’t want to see that, although I should be able to maintain a version for myself from the source, that isn’t going to be common, and I have no way to distribute it. My $.02.
Peter