I am reading a non-technical book by Sadhguru: Inner Engineering. He defines responsibility as the ability to respond to situations.
According to him, the logical mind says, "Get rid of your responsibilities and you shall be free". But the existential reality is "Have more options to respond and you shall be free".
This question is for freelancers who want to be truly free, free from the system which is meant to enslave people.
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stuff ;)
As long as you need money the system will always get you.
The main thing to me about freelancing is that I say yes or no.
If those two factors are fullfiled I am able to move freely. To save money you need to have an according higher price and to give software away you need to write maintainable/readable software.
The rest to me is up to your personality I guess. I personally would prefer writting only isolated software, but a lot of it depends on scale, purpose, environment, language ...
So it's hard to pick one, I only can refer to the idea of Uncle Bob in the talk 'the future of software development'. You have to take the responsibility for your software.