"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.