"If you have to ask permission, or answer to anyone, to make decisions about what you do then you don't have freedom."
Completely disagree. Freedom isn't binary. Everyone has to answer to someone.
- If you own your own company you are responsible for your employees and thus limits what you can do. Probably why he was glad to sell it and get rid of the company.
- Create your own open source project, as soon as it is used by other they will want additional feature and fixes.
- Working with others to create something means that there will be trade-offs on what everyone does.
"If you have to ask permission or answer to anyone then you don't have the kind of freedom I want."
Not sure what kind of freedom you want, but unless you are living on an island by yourself creating software that no one uses it seems your lying to yourself if you think you have achieved.
Okay, my experience is limited to one big company, but I found I rarely need to ask permission to do anything but launch. And that's only because launching instantly means more people will be using my product than most startups get in their lifetime. I'm perfectly free to build stuff, show it to friends (as long as the friends work within the company), improve it, make my own design calls, etc.
In fact, I'm encouraged to do so. When I joined, my boss said "If you see something that's broken, just go fix it and mail off a codereview". He's since told me "If you have an idea, just go ahead and implement it, don't even ask my permission." And when I've done so, the reaction has generally been quite positive - I got a free phone out of it, after all.
You have a good boss, and you probably joined earlier than others. However, I do have to admit that it's as good as it gets, in the big corporate world.
Actually I just joined less than 5 months ago, later than everyone else in my department save one person. But you're right; I do have a good boss, and my department has preserved more of the original company culture than many other departments.
I suspect that my experience is different from others more in the degree that it's officially sanctioned, not in what actually goes on though. I've heard - from several friends across several other big companies - that it's really common to have everyone spend about two hours a day working on their "real" job, and then the rest of the time either reading SlashDot or working on side businesses. After all, what's the worst they can do, fire you? Then you're in the same boat as someone who quits to do a startup, except that you can possibly collect unemployment. Most big companies are large enough that nobody knows what anyone else is really doing, anyways.
Right, but you keep the knowledge you gained in making that stuff. Any useful product has to be rewritten many times before it's useful enough for people to pay for. So they keep the first draft - startups throw out their code and start fresh routinely, so again, you're not much worse off than someone who quits their job to found a startup.
> Any useful product has to be rewritten many times before it's useful enough for people to pay for.
On the other hand, people have been talking about launching early and often. Even your first version of something could well be good enough to launch and iterate upon.
All in all, I'd rather not give my employer any of my own stuff.
The degree of freedom is what's important. Not even the CEO of a fortune 500 company has the freedom that the owner of a company has.
If you must ask permission, or answer to someone else, then you don't have the kind of freedom I want.