[davidw]

Incidentally, this is RMS' (Stallman, of course, not our own 'rms') suggestion for those who are unable to find a day job doing free software: do something unrelated to software (with the idea being the avoidance of contributing to proprietary software) that gives you free time. Hearing that in person from RMS was the beginning of the end of my interest in RMS style free software.

[johnrob]

The other way to look at that is the avoidance of IP conflicts. If your day job is not software related, then you won't have to worry about future IP lawsuits.

[bestes]

I'll be you use a lot of RMS-style free software, though! Just because you don't want to contribute, doesn't mean free software isn't a good thing.

[davidw]

I certainly do use GPL licensed software. The GPL makes sense in various situations, but that's a complicated and long topic.

By the way, I do contribute to free software, and enjoy doing so a great deal:

http://www.welton.it/freesoftware/

(Unfortunately the patches/ and files/ bits aren't working due to issues with mod_rails)

My issue is with the idea that I should under no circumstances work on proprietary software.