Not true. I know the guy who made DOSBox and the lady who runs HotU.
A much bigger reason is this:
https://www.patreon.com/hotu
If you're referring to Sarinee Achavanuntakul (a.k.a. Underdogs), she's no longer running the site, and hasn't been since 2005. The site was on hiatus for years and then disappeared completely. Somewhat later, UD offered a DB dump off the original site, and two "successor sites" surfaced, hotud.org and homeoftheunderdogs.net.
Neither was ever a true revival though, both more of a fancier archive.org approach. Neither webmaster ever put much effort into their sites. Some/most of the downloads worked, for a while. Hotud.org allowed adding new entries for a while, but there was basically no policing and it was a user-effort rather than one of the site owner. Eventually, the hotud.org site owner asked himself why he was shouldering the bills on this crappy site he so obviously not really cared about, so he took down the downloads. The site itself is still partially running, but the gig's over.
homeoftheunderdogs.net never even added new entries, and as far as I can tell, there are no downloads whatsoever these days, and no real effort is being put into providing links for those that can still be purchased (or again, like on GOG).
Why should anyone donate money for such a weaksauce approach?
If Notch were really the patron of gaming some people like to paint him, he could put a server in the basement of his multi-million dollar home and hire some nerd to run a game preservation site ala HOTU as his day job. Notch could fund it until the sun goes supernova from a tiny fraction of the interest he gets from the Microsoft money...
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rezaf