It's also an employer that lets me live in a place where rent+utilities is $1.5k/year.
Economically, I look at work I do on Free/Open Source software as an investment in reputation capital. In this case past such investments paid off with yet more work on FLOSS, which is a nice virtuous cycle to be in.
I'm trying to recall the context I heard this in, believe it may have been the radio program To the Best of Our Knowledge. Farmers talking about dealing with Monsanto and their GMO seed. One mentioned that for many farmers, the main concern wasn't so much revenue maximization as cost minimization.
It's struck me for a long time that Free Software offers a bit of both. It minimizes business costs (both direct license expense and licensing-derived limitations on use), while maximizing functional capabilities.
It doesn't entirely surprise me that someone as familiar with the concept as Joey Hess would extend this to his personal life. A $1.5k/year nut buys a hell of a lot of F-U freedom.
I have not gone into details about my living situation online. Being happy to live in the middle of nowhere helps; solar power and power efficient home design helps too. :)
His blog (http://joeyh.name/blog/) has several posts about how he lives, spread across the past few years. You'll have to search through them yourself, sorry, but he's not a prolific writer so just browsing through the archives should be easy enough.
Based on LinkedIn it looks like he's in Tennessee.
(This info is available publicly, you don't even need to be logged into LinkedIn to see it, so hopefully I'm not viewed as violating anyone's privacy :)
Consider this begging for a rundown on how you're pulling this off, 10k a year is about the floor in my experience and I've ranged far and worldwide. Have no problem living in the middle of nowhere.
Economically, I look at work I do on Free/Open Source software as an investment in reputation capital. In this case past such investments paid off with yet more work on FLOSS, which is a nice virtuous cycle to be in.