Having never been really involved with the Dwarf Fortress community/cult, but having played the game quite a bit, this exposé on the creator is extremely interesting. I always thought it must have taken a certain level of cleverness to build such an impressive simulation, but I honestly didn't think he'd be a Stanford Ph.D. Also, I'm honestly surprised they get that much in donations. It's very well deserved indeed and I'm happy to hear that they do.
What's interesting is that they could likely be making notch-like levels of money if they went the minecraft route; some public server code and subscriptions would yield a huge amount of revenue. Honestly, I don't think they want it. If they were interested in doing that, they'd have found a publisher, and started segmenting up the game for sale.
