Yup, as a software dev, I would love to be able to devote all my time to writing open source, but I gotta make money to live as well. Switching to working on OSS would be a huge leap of faith that there is someone out there willing pay/donate for my work. As it is, I think it will be my way of giving back once I have saved up enough money from my proprietary work, and hopefully I will be able to switch over sooner rather than later.
Maybe I'll go take a look at what the process is for getting grants from the government or non-profit orgs like Apache foundation...
Yup, that's true, and I am always open to and looking for new opportunities, but that also requires them to be interested in hiring me - not a trivial feat, especially in the current job market.
I'd also wager that the number of job positions writing OSS for organizations like that is much lower than proprietary job positions.
But you know what, I'll go shop around a little in my free time the next week or two. I'd love for (more of) my work to be publicly accessible and not locked up in a proprietary codebase.