Well to be fair in this case the bounty was setup before the recent rise in price. It's only getting attention now because it's now worth something.
But the donors could have backed out and did not, and there are other similarly-sized bounties in the bitcoin community (I currently make my living off of community donations as a bitcoin-core developer).
The two donors I see are gavin and theymos, the former receives bitcoins so the rise in price doesn't affect him, the latter paid nothing himself since those coins were all given to him. There's is also someone else that contributed about 1 BTC, but that cannot be taken back except wtogami himself negotiates with this donator to send it back.
Anyway, I think the attention is well deserved and I hope this contributes to a real fix. The current situation makes me not want to use the official bitcoin client under osx, at all. And this will be the case for a long time now, since I have no idea whether the bug will be correctly fixed.
Note: to my knowledge there has not been any loss of wallet due to this bug. You simply have to endure the annoyingly long process of re-indexing the block chain after a corruption.
The bug is unrelated to losing a wallet, just because the wallet is not even using leveldb (it is still at BDB). Your last sentence was the reason for my last earlier paragraph.
Don't set too much store in the MtGox price - it's not real money, because all their bank accounts are frozen. The value is high because it represents the substantial risk that nobody will get any of that money.
Yes, sometime back in spring or early summer I believe (based on my memory of #bitcon-dev conversations.. I don't frequent the scum-infested bitcointalk much).
But the donors could have backed out and did not, and there are other similarly-sized bounties in the bitcoin community (I currently make my living off of community donations as a bitcoin-core developer).