Apart from that, the IEEE specifications for the firewire layer as well as all its device specifications are not free of charge (and you don't get them for free if you pay for using Firewire in your products to the patent pool consortium as well afaik). It also requires that you at least own a few devices to do proper testing. I doubt that donations would even cover the costs related to that.
On the other hand, its quite suprising that the TCP stack bounty gathered "so much" money after all. At the end, you only get an outdated AmiTCP V3 stack in return which is not up to current standards. Afair, MorphOS' native stack is based on a more recent AmiTCP V4 version at least. Unfortunately, due to circumstances which have been discussed in public to death already, it didn't make it to release so far. But that's a different story ....

Regards,
pega-1