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?
Yeah, none of these would be sufficient to produce all the software that is "needed" or wanted. So, as long as there are people willing to pay for software they can't get for free, all software won't be free.
I support the idea of all software being free, including social changes that would be necessary for that to be realistic, such as serious alterations to capitalism.