You might not call it that, but for someone in devops with that length of experience, it's <50% of market value.
> Especially considering that the project isn't under heavy development.
According to the article, he spends ca. 100 hours a week on the project. It may not be under heavy development, but there's a constant stream of both development work and ops work.
> Also, I have to echo what other comments have said... he seems to be spending it oddly.
That is only relevant if you want to account for part of the $7000 as something other than salary, in which case he's even more woefully underpaid. Which he is anyway, given that he's also spending on some of the hosting and replacement parts out of his own pocket. Even so, his arrangement is not at all unusual at his level - I used to work for someone whose previous job involved flying from California to D.C. once a week for a couple of days. The cost of a travel arrangement like that is peanuts compared to his value. Especially given there's no established office or other admin costs.
> 1) Move him and his family closer to the data center (Perhaps difficult)
Why do you think he'd want to move for a job that's so underpaid, to one of the highest living cost regions in the world? Chances are good this would increase his monthly outgoings by more than he'd save on travel and board.
> 2) Move the servers to a data center that's closer to his home (Not as difficult)
Did you miss the part where isc.org that hosts the bulk of the server farm does not charge for it? If you can find someone with sufficiently low latency connection to major interchange points near him that are willing to host the bulk of the servers for free, I'm sure he'd be ecstatic to hear about it. If not, it'd almost certainly cost more than it'd save. It'd also represent a major risk to key internet infrastructure.
> 3) He could start using VMs like the rest of the world...
For stratum 1 servers? You clearly don't understand what it is he's doing. Stratum 1 servers needs a reliable physical connection to a reliable time source (such as a GPS receiver). He needs dedicated hardware. Try to get data center employees to properly handle non-standard hardware like that. I dare you.
> 4) Fire him and find someone else who would like a $7k/month stipend to do bugfixes (Fairly easy)
Good luck with that. Pretty much anyone prepared to take on that job for $7k/month including covering server costs and hardware repairs, is going to be woefully underqualified. In any case, if the situation doesn't improve, we'll find out soon given that he set an April deadline before he'll look for other things to do.
EDIT: Also note the part where it is unclear whether the $7k grant will even continue after April.