No actual profits yet, I've just been back-testing as well as forward-testing various strategies. It looks like writing the trading engine was the easy part.
They're not really targeting particular extension. Most people probably don't want to sell anyway so they would just waste time. They send email to everyone who have extension and then when any developer replies, only then they decide if they even want to buy. I have extension with 50k installs in last 5 years that has always on full access to visited pages (content script) and they offered $2k.
you're making some assumptions that every dev has morals, and that some unscrupulous dev didn't build the thing specifically in hopes of getting this offer
Sure, that's possible, and from a cynical perspective seems likely to have happened. But if I was unscrupulous, there seems to be a lot easier paths to money than making a product, offering it for free, and hoping someone will offer to buy it from you to corrupt it.
Not really, the initialization of the JVM is fast(er), but initializing the Clojure runtime took a lot of time. At least in 1.7, not sure if it got better in the meantime.
I could start and run Java programs way faster than just starting the Clojure REPL.