It's really important to manage versioned schema for events and defining rules around evolution of schemas, hopefully with tooling support like via Avro's Schema Registry or Protobuf's forward and backwards compatibility guarantees.
No, it's really not a high number. It's right on the money for 3 years in-the-trenches experience making the move into consultancy -- around $130-140/hr billable, which is what I was billed out at in the mid 2000s as a .NET consultant.
Getting high hourly rates isn't the hard part. It's maintaining consistent work across multiple clients while taking the time to market yourself and negotiate contracts. That's not an easy task for someone who has never worked on their own before. Unless it's an unusual circumstance (like he had one client the whole time), I think averaging 20 billables a week in the first year is pretty impressive for someone to do.
There are plenty of fair use exemptions to copyright. That said, US law is not the highest of moral standards to aspire to. Especially US copyright law. We've been flaunting it online forever, because it's obviously ridiculous and still hasn't caught up with what's fair and equitable in 30 years.
If you're staying within the boundaries of fair use, you only have a Terms of Service to contend with. What you want to aspire to is meaningless versus what the law of the land is (which is what is enforced). That is my point. I don't disagree that most first world copyright law is overzealous and in a lot of scenarios, unreasonable.
True. The FEIE does cut that down a bit, but anything over the FEIE limits would still be subject to tax in the US, though not in the host country, as you mentioned. I was simply making the point that having a bona fide tax residence in a country with a lower tax rate than the US does not necessarily mean that taxes will simply be those of the host country with lower tax rates (e.g. Dubai, Singapore, etc.).
