Coding is only difficult because we have made it difficult. It should be possible for a user who is not overly familiar with programming to open up the source,

Coding is only difficult because we have made it difficult. It should be possible for a user who is not overly familiar with programming to open up the source, find the part they want to change, change it, and rebuild the changed software. Instead, we have been making all our software as complicated to understand and edit as possible, and then only shipping binaries in order to hide the complexity. The advice of my window manager, i3, regarding source installs is: don't. Disregarding that advice, and after fighting with my package manager to get the required libs, `make` made it extremely easy to build. From there, the edit I wanted to perform required changing the value of a constant from 3 to 0. Not hours and hours at all. Making this feasible for everyday users is within reach. If the focus of the free software movement had been on making software that users can modify on a physical and practical level, rather than just a legal and technical level, we might see everyday users patching their software. That didn't happen, and it doesn't seem many people care about making it happen, and so the situation won't change.