Vision

Original vision of Joerg Mueller

Original vision of Joerg Mueller.

Joerg Muller is the original author of FreeMind, developing it up to the version 0.4.0. Here follows what he's got to say on his original vision:

What I had in mind when I began to write FreeMind, was creating a collaborative mind where people can intuitively share their ideas, knowledge and thoughts with each other. Of course FreeMind is only a first step into this direction, but I did this first step. Now a Mode must be implemented that makes collaboration over the Internet possible, maybe using the Topic-Map standard. I think linear text is a very poor way of representing knowledge, and by using trees and networks, visual representation, internet collaboration and open source we should be able to create some kind of a collaborative mind.

FreeMind now has evolved from a specific Mind Map Editor to a generic editor for tree structured data. I want FreeMind to become for tree structured data what emacs is for linear data (ie. text).

One may think of extending FreeMind to work with networks as opposed to trees only, an example of this being Topic Maps (ISO).

Joerg's vision of FreeMind becoming Emacs for tree data is intriguing, but rather far fetched at the time. You would need to provide scripting facility and at least many basic operations, like upcase, downcase, replace and many others. It is even not evident that this goal valuable compared to other goals - there many quite obvious and still missing features. --Daniel Polansky