Yeah, they used to do that for Thunderbird. I assume it wasn't worth the hassle, and unless you are donating a serious amount of money they won't agree to take on the risk involved.

Once upon a time, someone affiliated with Thunderbird project maintenance/governance posted a detailed reply to HN describing how hard it was to get Mozilla to release funds that it had been been collecting from Thunderbird donors. That comment is obviously not lost to the sands of time, but it has proven quite difficult to relocate.

It sounds like there was a period of time where the donations just sat there before a system was developed to allow Thunderbird total control. It's somewhat understandable, at the time Thunderbird shared many resources with Firefox but if some of the donation money was used for Firefox they'd break the terms of the donations.

This is nothing more than apologetics, and not even good apologetics. Instead, speculative apologetics, i.e. no solid footing by which to understand the premise.

Compared to "I'm pretty sure I read once things were bad." Sometimes things are hard, Thunderbird didn't seem very upset as they decided to stay with Mozilla during the period.