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The "pay" was access to the server, bandwidth, codebase, and player base. Those are all assets that the admins/owners of the game provided.
Furthermore, just because a job is a volunteer job doesn't change the fact that there was most certainly an agreement, either implied or formally stated, that any code written for that mud was property of that mud.
Obviously, a smart admin makes sure every builder/coder agrees to this explicitly in advance. But even those who did not require such an agreement are not hosed.
Furthermore, I don't think this is rising to the level of a legal matter. This is really a discussion of ethics. It is certainly ethical for a mud owner to be able to keep code that was written on and for his/her game, regardless of the changing whims of the people who wrote it.
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