> You can be a university professor. You can be funded by grants. I actually have a bunch of friends that I went to college with, who all have PhDs now. Gettin

> You can be a university professor. You can be funded by grants. I actually have a bunch of friends that I went to college with, who all have PhDs now. Getting a tenure track position is nearly impossible. Also, grants are extremely hard to get. They’re all working either: (1) as postdocs (where there is a grant funding it), or worse (2) looking for a postdoctoral or tenure-track position (or have lost a postdoc position because the grant ran out). These things are incredibly hard to do. > You can have a job working for a non-software company that lets you produce free software for that company's use that you can also give away, while they keep paying your salary. If the plan is abolish proprietary software, there’s not gonna be a lot of companies making money selling software, ie making software. So do you mean some hardware company that needs to write some specific software for its needs? I suppose there could be a world where most/all software is free (in GNU terms), but you’d end up with almost everything becoming web-based SaaS, and that would be the commercial model. (I mean, we’re already pretty close to that.) Universal basic income requires a tax base of highly productive, and high earning taxpayers. Just look at the economic contribution of software and technology companies. If the government were to take a wrecking ball to that literal economic powerhouse, how significantly would the tax base shrink by?