Not really. The repo is still MIT. He said he won’t make further changes, but hasn’t set up his project with a different license.

It seems like his current take is just seeking patronage to keep working on an MIT project.

I think this happens quite a bit, but not normally this way. There are lots of companies who employ people with the sole purpose of writing for MIT/Apache/BSD projects. So I guess that’s a form of patronage.

I hope this guy gets what he likes. I’ve never heard of this project, but it has at least 26k people who liked it enough to star it on GitHub. Not sure how that will ever equate to 100k+/year.