That is very off as the technic team do not make anything from the donations in fact all the donation links are direct copy and pastes of the mod authors own links. The only money the technic team makes is via the few ads they have on the site/forum which barely covers the hosting costs and no where near the terabits of bandwidth they blow though hosting the mods for the modders.
All this has been confirmed by several sources and places. It is just a common rumor thrown around by technic haters that they have to be making a profit form it as doing it for the good of the community is unlikely to them. Due to the evil picture painted of them by fellow haters, when in fact their is nothing evil about them other then a dislike of all the barriers mod authors put forth against the concept of making modded minecraft as fun and easy as possible for the masses.
My bad then, but the fact remains that they gain money out of something they didn't even ask before using.
I don't see them as evil, just as some people that do it "because they can", and a self entitled bunch.
FTB and other packs got the authors agreement quite easily,so "barriers mod authors put forth" is not quite real.
Basically, they ask that their work is recognized as theirs.
If possible, they would like to be able to keep earning a little fee through addfly, because for most of them, it might pay a donut or two per year.
The donations are all well and good, but adds are a way for people that don't have the money to spare to still give some money. Plus, putting donation links will only serve the biggest and most used mods in the packs, and all the smaller or unknown that are still in and used unknowingly won't receive a cent.
There is no ideal way to content everyone, but talking about barriers when you didn't even try in the first place is just giving yourself an excuse to continue without a care.
I know many will take what follows the wrong way, but please try to read before reacting.
One of the reasons that people pirate games and softwares on PC, apart from the pirates themselves, is because they once couldn't afford something and pirated it.
Having experienced how easy it was to get something without the restrictions of a trial or anything, they continued to download pirated keys and versions, because why pay when you can get it for free, right?
And now, we see many games being lousy ports from consoles, or not coming at all, with the stated reason being "piracy" every single time; mostly to give themselves an excuse, but whatever.
I don't mean to say that they pirate anything, and am not a fan of attacking based on copyrights and all that, because it's always blurry anyway.
What I mean is that they first made the pack for themselves and a couple of friends, to play together with some friends, and many of us did something similar when we played on little servers hosted on our machines.
But when it became public, there were some mods that the authors didn't want to give the right, to anyone.
So it was easier to come up with an excuse and not caring.
It did a lot of good to Minecraft and modding, pushing Forge, ModLoader and modders to go out of their way and make the install and compatibility easier.
MultiMC also benefited from the trend being "why bother installing mods when we can just pick tekkit", and made an unbelievably great tool that we now know.
The two bad points are screwing mod authors, and the fact that most people playing the pack don't even know the mods name, and will say "this is tekkit" on any video that stars even a single mod that is the same.
I personally was always from the group to search for mods and install them myself, keeping them updated as I went, so that might be why I don't understand fully why people make such a big deal of tekkit/technik, but when talking about haters and out of the place quotes, we see them in both camps.