I guess they still have a moral right to ask their contributors to be up front about the incentives involved in their contributions (they can't demand disclosure, but they could still refuse contributions where they don't feel they have enough understanding of the incentives involved).

The point being, setting the thing up behind their back brings a lot of risk of poisoning the relationship between the contributor and the project.

Maybe it's stupid for a project to act like that, but once it turns into a hair splitting exercise, you might as well split all of them.