Of course a full-time job sucks. Most people need one anyway in order to pay the rent. If you have the luxury of getting away without it, of course why wouldn't you?

I have the luxury of working a 4/5ths time (four days a week job). I'm still a programmer. At a university. That also allows me to work reasonable hours on that 4/5th time job, take personal days for personal business, etc. And most of what I write is open source, which is very nice. It's definitely still a trade-off, it's a very frustrating place to work sometimes, I don't always get to work on interesting problems (but sometimes do, in some periods often), I don't have enough colleagues to work on the _really_ cool stuff that would take more IT resources than my employer is willing to devote to what I think would be the really cool stuff. Etc.

My impression is that trying to start your own business will end up taking _more_ of your time than a 'full time job', not less. But if you end up finding that time more rewarding to spend, then, great.