Oh so many useful utilities to write. Folks often say "what should I do with my programming skills?" when there are endless tools, whos lack hold us back.
My favorite would be a tool that wrote a Linux device tree source file, by digesting the board schematic. Port Linux to your new device with one click! Of course, that would take away a large part of my contracts. I'd have to do some real work for a change.
If you build it yourself you could easily continue those contracts with way less work put in. There's many, many jobs out there that exist only because people don't think they can read the documentation and figure out how to run things themselves.
If the contracts start to dry up, offer it as an automated service. Look at how many people still pay to have someone install and configure things like Wordpress. There's literally thousands of free guides on the internet about how to do it yourself but people will gladly hand over their money to have someone that claims to be an expert do it instead.
Only if he’s a freelancer. If he works for a company, they could just take this piece of work product that he made, use it in all the ways your just described, and then lay him off.
If they write it in their free time, they could offer to sell it to their company for 2x yearly salary or something. Got a buddy that has done that 3 jobs in a row.
Depends on your contract. It’s not uncommon (or even necessarily unreasonable if you’re a full time employee) for a contract to stipulate that any code you write during the period of your employment that you make use of at work is owned by your company. I would imagine there are exceptions to this - I don’t think an employer could make a case that they own your Emacs scripts if you use them both at home and at work, and they certainly couldn’t try to take ownership of your side hustle that has absolutely nothing to do with your job - but for a fairly niche tool which produces value at your job, I think they’d be at least trying their hand at holding onto the IP if/when you leave, and restricting you from selling it on the side while you’re still employed. Probably also depends on the culture at your workplace and how decent your managers/bosses are.
To work well the schematics would have to be well-formed, there need be a chip database of pinouts, clocks, enables and address strapping, and Linux would need a dts schema (its ad-hoc now). Lots of spadework I guess.
My favorite would be a tool that wrote a Linux device tree source file, by digesting the board schematic. Port Linux to your new device with one click! Of course, that would take away a large part of my contracts. I'd have to do some real work for a change.