By liberating, I mean that one isn't tied down to the product roadmap and release schedule of the developers.  If I find a bug, not only can I report it, I can fix it myself.  If I can't fix it myself, I can often find someone to fix it for me.

Imagine writing to MicroSoft and saying "Please can you make this change to Office - just for me?"  If you ever got a response, it would be "No".  To be fair, you may also get the same reply from OpenOffice - the free replacement for MicroSoft Office - but because OpenOffice is Open Source, you can scratch the itch yourself.

If your itch-scratching is useful, others will benefit from it.  If you are the only one benefiting from it, so what? You're happier and more productive.

I use WordPress Mobile Pack.  It creates a mobile version of this blog.  It's a very easy to use and very powerful plugin.

Unfortunately, like all software, it has bugs.

WPMP Bug

What you're seeing in the screenshot is WPMP picking up a shortcode and, rather than ignoring it, rendering it as human readable text within the teaser.  It's ugly and confusing.

So, I raised a bug report and though "I bet I can fix this!".  Now, I'm not the world's most talented programmer - but with my knowledge of PHP and WordPress plugin architecture, I was able to locate the problem, fix it, test it and deploy it within half an hour.

if(strpos($content, '[')!==false)
{
   $content = "Read more";
}

That's it.  Judicouly applied in the correct place made my problems disappear.

So, that's why I love Open Source.  It places my destiny in my hands.