Makes perfect sense, thanks. I think the situation here is very similar. Telling a contractor when and where to work can get the client in legal trouble ("Scheinselbstständigkeit", one of those lovely german words ;).
How that works out in practice probably depends on the company. If you work a gig at Siemens it might be different than at a startup (that is funded well enough to afford freelancers).
I only have experience with two big corps so far (keep coming back to the second one ;), but I've seen quite a few contractors at both and some of them were just plain flaky. That of course makes it worse for all of us as well, wrt to clients tolerance for things like remote work, etc.
I'll be in Berlin next week (I missed Nikolaus and I have some belated shoes to fill; failing that though definately again around silvester)
If you're up for a beer or sixteen on me, I'd really find the insider scoop useful on a more personal medium; I'm sure we could probably both get something from it, at least the worst would be a lot of free beer!
You can find me on freenode as 'cyb3rpunk' (inside a shiny new irssi in some tmux somewhere so might take me a while to respond) if you're up for it -- otherwise, prost!
I only have experience with two big corps so far (keep coming back to the second one ;), but I've seen quite a few contractors at both and some of them were just plain flaky. That of course makes it worse for all of us as well, wrt to clients tolerance for things like remote work, etc.