While I don’t like it either, I see the necessity of it if Fritzing is to survive. Only about .1% of the people downloading the code in the past made a donation with the previous download page, and there needs to be a revenue stream to support the web site, download infrastructure, and development. I don’t think the donation violates gpl, it has always been true under gpl that a fee for a service is fine. In this case the fee pays for the infrastructure to build and publish a distribution (which, having built a build environment for development I can testify, takes at least a couple of mandays of time to do!) You are, as you point out, free to download the code from github, and compile it yourself, it isn’t anywhere near easy, but it is possible. My self I would rather make the donation than go through that hassle (although I have to anyway to do development.) In the 3 or more years that I have been involved in Fritzing, I’ve been watching it die. There are far fewer people participating here in the forum than when I started and much expertise and history has been lost (most of the folks that taught me to make parts are no longer participating here, which is a big loss.) In the 3 or more years since the last release before the latest 0.9.4 release (which is mostly a test of the new build environment) there were only a handful of commits to the code base, because development had basically died. History seems to say that Kjell is correct, that for development of Fritzing to proceed, a revenue stream to fund professional developers is needed, because the code base is too complex to depend on volunteers. To me that seems correct (and I have a couple of fixes in the 0.9.4 release, so I have experience trying to modify the code, it is not at all simple and is pretty much undocumented.) We are between a rock and a hard place, but there is a new release, which will keep Fritzing from dying from bit rot (which was starting to happen, the libraries were getting so old they are unsupported on some systems) for another few years, and hopefully development will restart. That is far better than I have managed to do over the last couple of years of trying to restart development, and I for one am happy to see it happen as I don’t want Fritzing to die.
Peter