It's always amazing how adding a little money to the mix makes people lose their minds. NJS was working for free. KR raised some money from large businesses, then told NJS to keep working for free. NJS retroactively discovered that working for free is stupid, and tried demanding all the money NJS raised. This didn't happen, of course, since he had no leverage at all on NJS besides complaining online.
The takeaway here appears to be "never work for free". If NJS has worked on his own project, controlled by him alone, this wouldn't have happened. If you donate a bunch of work to an open source project, then... well... the source is open.
Where did KR say he was going to hire NJS or give him any money? NJS is not even on the contributor list for requests I don't think - so of all the people to hire is he even at the top of queue?
And is it impossible that KR is doing an order of magnitude more work on the requests projects, with a much longer track records and raised the money directly to himself (and so has to pay taxes potentially on it) such that using it to support his work on requests is unreasonable?
The takeaway here appears to be "never work for free". If NJS has worked on his own project, controlled by him alone, this wouldn't have happened. If you donate a bunch of work to an open source project, then... well... the source is open.