he could invest 50% or more of his salary in this work via donation and it would probably help the cause much more than his 40 hours/week. It sounds more like a middle life crisis to me.
I've been in a startup where the product was so cool that we'd get people working for nothing but options because they were too burned out by $MEGACORP developer culture. The money developers were leaving was so ridiculous I figure we could have charged people to work for us and we'd still have gotten more applications than we knew what to do with.
disclaimer, i guess: i work at a sister project of the NAO