> One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works.

The canonical example was RMS needing to fix a printer driver bug back before software updates were really a thing. That meant that there was a greater motivation for users to maintain their changes.

Today, with software being an evergreen stack of turtles from the BIOS all the way up the OS to the remote APIs the qpp interacts with, expecting a user to indefinitely maintain their private fork of any software is a really big stretch.

Unless it is a local-only, unmaintained project that doesn't get deployed through a software repository or an app store, I think that original vision of open source software is very much the exception and not the rule.