OneAndOneIs2

I read an article about the "walled gardens" being used to keep people tied to a brand/product these days. Such as having all your music in iTunes meaning it would be hard to move from Apple to Android.

Funny thing is.. I don't have that problem. With any of my stuff.

I have a smartphone. It's android. The only music I've put on it is stuff I've ripped from my CD collection. I've never used iTunes.

I have an ebook. It's a Kindle. The only books I've bought to put on it are from O'Reilly, with their guarantee of DRM-free, all-formats, for life. The rest were free downloads (Project Gutenburg FTW!) I don't even know how Amazon's ebook-to-kindle system works.

I have numerous computers, they all run Linux. There's not a single piece of software I can think of that I like using that I couldn't grab the source code & rewrite if I wanted to.

Even the programming languages I know & use are the free & unencumbered ones - No .Net or C#, just Perl, Javascript, Haskell, C...

Funny thing is, unlike people such as RMS, I haven't reached this state of freedom by conscious choice, so much as instinct. "This is really cool and it only has these tiny restrictions" rings alarms bells in my head. I avoid them in the same way as I would avoid parking my car in a run-down area where the houses have broken windows and peeling paint.

I have a hard time getting interested in using a JS framework that we're moving to at work because it more or less requires you to use a proprietary IDE. It's not that I have anything against the software itself. I just don't like the feeling that as I use it, a wall is slowly raising up out of the ground around me.

I like my life as it is, wall-free.

And as the old saying goes, in a world without walls, why would you need Windows?? ;)