The problem comes that, as with many things, people like to live others' values for them. People become unreasonable. My friend was worried that he'd lose the respect, unreasonably in my view, of the community for not doing the "right thing", which in his view was dealing with a feature and set of PRs that were not on the roadmap to happen just now. And that word "sell out" - his word - for asking to be paid for his time was the root fear.