About a year or two ago, I approached Jim with a partnership proposal, where I/my company would use PfSense "under the hood", but would use a completely different software stack on top of that, including a custom developed UI (My personal belief is that the pfsense UI could use a lot of improvements. This was before they introduced the Bootstrap based UI, but the statement still stands. It could do with a number of optimizations and some "intelligence" built in.)
To make a long story short, I didn't get the impression that he was willing to "deal". All I interpreted from his responses was "You wanna screw us over by using the pfsense name and not give us any money", which wasn't true. My exploratory talks were exactly the opposite, to figure what could be worked out with them as a partnership.
Didn't pursue it any further. I'm sure he's a great guy, but...