[EvanAnderson]

> It strikes me as endearing, but naive, to believe that most people would be able to treat software as anything but a black box simply if the source code were available to them.

I don't think end users modifying software is a realistic scenario, but that doesn't mean there aren't realistic scenarios enabled by Free software.

Having (appropriately licensed) source code available means people can pay others (with the necessary skills) to adapt software to their needs. Closed source software greatly restricts or removes that possibility.

[brnaftr361]

I don't think that's fair. There are a lot of instances where people go out of their way to experiment with systems despite limited literacy. The example that seems most salient is PSP homebrew, something I was doing at the age of 13 without a single hint of how anything computer related functioned.

The question becomes one of community and accessibility, and community begets accessibility. Opening source allows for easier access to fundamental aspects and lowers the "activation energy" of the whole process to develop and thus invites greater participation. Like how many man-hours get spent probing for vulnerabilities that enable jailbreaking? And note that these are specialized rarefied man-hours, and the whole system is also adversarial in that those seeking to crack the code are in competition with those trying to conceal it.

Pull all that out and make it all accessible and perhaps 13-year-old me would've tried to recode that 64x64 limit on the icons and learned something in the process, enable, iterate, participate...

[EvanAnderson]

I think Free software encourages exceptional end users to participate as you're describing. I didn't mean to imply differently. Encouraging this kind of development is definitely good.

The bigger win that I see, though, is enabling communities of users to band together and work together or finance development of software with the community's common goals in mind. That's not something that proprietary software has historically done much of, and proprietary software doesn't permit that community to fork the software when goals don't align.