That already happens here. I am old dev who was the goto guy for people with certain business and technical questions. Not anymore (which is part good, as I'm interrupted much less, and part bad, as sometimes they regard the wrong answer as truth).
Unless it's illegal in more places, I think they won't care. In my experience, the percentage of free riders in Brazil is higher (due to circumstances, better said).
I can't stop thinking what happened when CASE tools, WYSIWIG, UML, Model Driven Architecture/Development, etc was pushed into devs. I know, it's a different phenomenon (that was a graphical visual push, this keeps the text).
My rules: if it's a person I interact everyday, private hello (hi, hey) is ok, and answered with equivalent. If we don't interact usually or have never, if I'm the one starting, then it's "Hi, I'm ..., the one responsible for ... We have this case ... etc etc.". I accept anything.
But, anyways, it's just life, don't know why people (even from my generation) are nervous these days.
I suppose Synadia will keep its plan to have NATS (or whatever it intend to call it) with a "business license". And, unless this episode wakes some people up, some damaged has been done (to the project/community).
I'm not against this kind of move (Synadia's) by itself, but it seems too early. I've been following NATS for some time, and undeservedly, it hasn't taken off. I could find only two books; documentation is clean but I think it could be improved; blog posts, tutorials, videos are few and sparse in time; community tools are nil (from what I could find). A non-open source license is going to restrict adoption even more.
I recommended it to my clients every time it looked like a solution to the problem, but never been able to convince, due to the lack of community or big cloud sponsorship/offerings.