My friend said something that resonates with me now, and has done since we met a few years back: "In our initiation as scientists, we do it with passion and with conviction. We do it to contribute to a better world. We believe that the sciences are far from corruption and politics" \citep{i}. In fact, science has to grapple with those issues every single day. This story can be summarised in the title of this post, but revamps towards the end. In Nov 2012, I joined an international PhD program. I had travelled for 38 hours non-stop and despite a time zone difference of 14 hours, I was summoned to my first PhD meeting 12 hours after arrival. That day, I signed a confidentiality agreement, which stated that any process and results from my PhD will become the Intellectual Property (IP) of my University. I had no problem with it; I was a scholarship recipient and that was standard procedure, or so they said. Only in the first month of my PhD, I was informed that my group had received industry funding and, due to this, all our research data was restricted by rigorous confidentiality. Around the fourth month of my PhD, my supervisor suggested that I should focus my work on some of this confidential data. He said the datasets were of excellent quality and that we would learn a lot from it. He did mention that there might be some restrictions on publications, but assured me that I would have other options to publish. What I did not know, was that there was a key relationship between my research and the industry grant objectives. Almost at the end of my second year, my research group splintered when both of my supervisors moved to another University.At that stage, I wanted to seize the opportunity to work with a different local supervisor. Things got grey, I had a stern warning from my supervisor. Because of the confidentiality agreement by which I was bound, I had no ownership of my research data. Hence, I could not continue with my thesis if I decided to change my supervisor. I was left in limbo. After the struggle, I decided that my work needed to be finished. After all, I was not going to let those two years of work go down the drain.  I continued my PhD research, then finished my thesis. However, my thesis has an embargo period of three years (from October 2016), despite my many attempts to make even some small parts of it public. Luckily, that is not the end of this story. I do not want this to happen to others, especially when it goes against our principles. Since then, I have become an advocate of open science. I can say that at the time, I did not understand what it meant to have confidential restrictions. Restrictions including, not being able to talk openly to anyone about my research for fear of breaching the legal agreement. I was prevented from attending, or even applying to present at conferences because the data I was researching was not openly accessible. Not only that, but in order to have some publications, I had to work on other datasets outside of my PhD topic.  Science needs to be open in order to better understand confidential restrictions and act upon that. We need open data to be able to talk openly about our research. Open access enables movement, freedom, learning and development. Open access should cut through biased economic interests, lack of ethics and unclear statements. I do open science to grow and help others grow. I believe that unshared knowledge is dead knowledge. Today (Oct 24th, 2017) is a key day for writing this text as Stephen Hawking has granted open access to his 51-year-old thesis \cite{universes}. My thesis will be open access from day one after the embargo, for anyone who wants to read it. Only two external reviewers were able to access it under a confidential agreement, that review is worth sharing: "The results presented are novel, broad and significant, and are of strong value. Future research in this area will no doubt use them on which to build further knowledge. The methodology developed will also be of interest to the bioinformatics community" \cite{bioscience}.