Fundraisers are penalized on HN because they don't fit the site mandate. There are always exceptions though. If we had known about this one we might have made an exception for it.
By the way, this thread took a huge dive at some point - was that due to some manual penalty?
And now for something completely different: It just occurred to me that Magit's success is partially due to the use of Lisp, for reasons similar to those described in "Beating the Averages" [2]. Just thought that would be worth mentioning to give this more relevance to the HN crowd ;-)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819256 [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html