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Another translation:

> Whoever then wishes to be free, let him neither wish for any thing nor avoid anything which depends on others: if he does not observe this rule, he must be a slave.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

That was my (native British English) reading of the English too - it's just that GP's quote clips the context.

My parsing of the sentence of the "neither wish to have" part is that the thing the other person controls is the object of this wish.

So it still works if we extrapolate that to something like "If I was in control of this software, I would make it so much better." Well, congrats, because you are (in FOSS)! Even if someone else maintains a project, you can always fork it.