Two days ago I encountered this saying of Jean Jacques Rousseau, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Indeed there is a large part of the world that is still in chains. Fortunately, I am quite free.
My personal challenge in achieving freedom involves balancing between the needs of my children, family and work (not excluding my hobbies). “You have to give life in order to get life,” my grandmother said to me. It sounds right to me. You need to invest yourself in what you do to get good results.
Freedom and knowledge are related. When you have knowledge you have more power and capabilities. Therefore, I would like to mention the OLPC project. When you have access to the Internet, you have the world's knowledge at your hands. OLPC is an example of an education project that aims to give a computer and Internet access to all if possible.
As a developer, I am interested in things that give me the “Freedom to do” at work. The best technology enables us "to do" with little effort and good results. Interesting enough this relates strongly to free stuff:
- Open source – the best tools are not those that have "paid support" but those that give the freedom to do as you choose, and offer a really vibrant community.
- Web 2.0 mashups – free to mash and leverage other sites.
- Sharing & free stuff – sharing thoughts, ideas.
Yet, if everything is free, how will one earn? Eventually someone needs to pay. So Free and Freedom sometimes collide. "Radiohead" is selling their latest album for "how much would you like it?" By download, which seems to offer a high degree of freedom while they get the money with very little overhead from the distribution channel. I hope they sell lots.
How does all of this relate to SharedBook?
We enable users to create the books they really want with little effort. When we offer enough “Freedom,” other mashups use it.
There are lots of places one can add Freedom to a product and service. For us, it could be integration as we do today with client content, embedding our product within another product, or as a platform which embeds another application within ours.
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