From the vim website: "Why those ads?

The profits made from ads and links on vim.org go to ICCF Holland to help poor children in Uganda."

Is there somewhere you can point that states ad profit is going to developers?

Vim isn't ad-supported. Vim has one messsage that you might consider an ad, and the money doesn't support vim's development, it goes to charity. I think it also used to be possible to donate to vim directly to support the development, but I think that money goes to charity now too.

(I personally don't think "help poor children in Uganda by donating" is an ad).

Where exactly is this message? I use Vim fairly often and I've never seen it...

:help license

I think in earlier vim versions, you could see a message if you opened vim without a file (vim -u NONE # to prevent .vimrc from doing whatever shenanigans you've set up)

Huh. My .vimrc is pretty simple and definitely doesn't include a "don't show donation messages" line, but I do see the message on the front screen when I do `vim -u NONE`. It's not there when I execute `vim`.

When you start Vim (without arguments) it says "VIM - Vi IMproved" .... "Help poor children in Uganda! type :help iccf<Enter> for information". I just noticed that it actually cycles a few through messages now (version 8.something), so you may have to restart a couple of times to see the message. But IIRC it used to always just display the "help children in Uganda" message.

Strangely, it doesn't do that on any machine I have access to, despite the fact that I can find nothing in my .vimrc file that would suppress it. If I run `vim -u NONe` as the sibling comment suggested then I do see the message.

Also the guy who wrote vim is now at google