It's PR. First the petition and now this fundraiser. Sorry but it feels more like a stunt than anything sincere otherwise they would front the money. They certainly have the funds for it.
$200k is absolutely not going to come close to covering their legal fees possibly in any scenario but definitely if Oracle tries to drag out the process.
> I can justify spending money on it because it does get Deno's name out there - blog posts posted to http://deno.com, etc - but without support it's pretty likely our legal bills will dwarf whatever that marketing is worth
Hard to not be cynical about the whole thing, especially when it's a private VC backed company doing this and not say the OpenJS Foundation.
Do not anthropenisize Larry Ellison.