Seems like a bad deal for him if the results of his 50% time is owned by mr gloslick.
If you spend time to contribute to the Rails community, you can easily find consulting jobs and get to keep 100% of your work (without the middleman). I'm not sure I understand the story here.
If you spend time to contribute to the Rails community, you can easily find consulting jobs and get to keep 100% of your work (without the middleman). I'm not sure I understand the story here.
I think the idea here is that the company is taking on the risk of finding actual work for him. If you are freelancing, sure, you have 100% of your time to do whatever you want. But you also need to eat, and that means you waste time hunting down jobs, taking specs, communicating with clients, etc. If you work for a company, someone else does that and you just do the work as it's assigned. The rest of your time is for open source stuff.
I am in a situation like this. Sure, my time is billed at $175 an hour, and I only see a small porition of that. But usually I have about 90% of my time to work on open source projects, and I get the same paycheck (and insurance benefits) every month.
If you spend time to contribute to the Rails community, you can easily find consulting jobs and get to keep 100% of your work (without the middleman). I'm not sure I understand the story here.