JR, however, has publicly stated he will spend more time with his family.
That's his complete right.
Who doubted JR's right to spend time with his family? Of course he can spend time with his family, but that certainly does mean he will spend less time on Mastercoin. Rather than invoking high-flown words like "rights", just ask yourself the following question: if there are two developers of comparable skill who are competing for the same job and salary, and one of them says he is willing to work 60 hours and the other says he is willing to work 40 hours, which one will you choose?
In general when I'm hiring people for Mastercoin, I never state any expectations of hours, just the expectation of a "50% position", "100% position", or whatever. It is up to J.R to manage how much he believes his 100% should be in terms of hours, according to his preferences.
This is absurd. Traditionally, one's boss does not ask one how many hours he would like to work, why should Mastercoin be an exception to this?!
This is also why I am uncomfortable with your suggestion that you and JR not get paid; if there is no salary involved than expectations become less rigorous. I would love for both of you to continue to work on the project, but I think that only salaried employees should be counted as full-time developers, as it will make things less ambiguous.
Many venture capitalist and private equity firms expect 60-80 hours a week from their employees, and they often have much less money and much less room for growth than Mastercoin.
I can't emphasize enough that Mastercoin is *not* the only project of its kind, and that the other projects are catching up!
Mastercoin is a $100 million project with lots of room for growth. It's absolutely ludicrous that we should have to beg an important member of the community to devote time to it.
EDIT: Ron, my general point is that you are not considering things as wholly from the perspective of the success of the Mastercoin project as you ought to. You are certainly entitled to the belief that Mastercoin devs don't have to commit to working a minimum number of hours each week, but it's possible that one of the projects competing with Mastercoin *does* have more stringent demands of its developers, and will accordingly complete its development first. If you are willing to maintain your principles, even when they endanger the success of the Mastercoin project, that is your decision. However, you (and the rest of the board) owe it to the investors to say so explicitly, that way we can decide whether we want to invest our money elsewhere.
EDIT 2: I am sorry to double-post, but so far only vokain has answered rbdrbd's question, and I think it is in the interest of the Mastercoin community to know the background of its board: "Do we have anyone on the board that has "boot on the ground" operational experience growing profitable software/tech startups with more than 5-10 employees?"