Turns out I've fed my family just fine working on free software for most of my life (sometimes as a software engineer, but more often as a researcher, entrepreneur, executive, and otherwise). Probably 75% of my jobs.

Even in an extreme hypothetical -- if the government were to mandate that all software be free software -- only a minority of software developers would lose their jobs. Banks still need to manage transactions. Employers still need to manage payroll. Google still needs to serve up ads and search results. And I don't want to host AWS myself. Those organizations will continue to pay to build software.

There's a huge bit of confusion that the word 'free' somehow means you don't get paid. It doesn't. It turns out if the source code pops up on github under a GPL license, most of the time, the world just keeps on ticking.

There are exceptions, of course -- companies like Adobe would likely disappear -- but for 90+% of jobs in software, whether it's free software or proprietary impacts your ability to make money not-at-all.

The most successful organization I helped found was almost exclusively free software. There were hundreds of people using our platform as open source, and zero of them competed with us head-on. The only differences were: (1) our customers trusted us a lot more (if we went away, they wouldn't be SOL) (2) we had a massive amount of engineering work done on someone else's dime.

In more senior roles, or even being more assertive in most junior roles, I could usually release what I was working on as free software by asking. Right now, of the programming work I do, about 90% is free software. The organization I work at is probably 95% proprietary software. The value of keeping me around + good PR + possible contributions + ... is much higher than the value of having exclusive rights to source code that I write.