Protesilaos Stavrou articulated it well: a free software license alone does not empower users to be truly free if they lack the expertise to exercise those freedoms — the movement narrowed its focus to legal requirements and code, effectively limiting its audience to technical enthusiasts. Mahmoud Mazouz made a related argument: even when source code is available, the practical costs of building, understanding, and modifying it are prohibitive for most people.
Previously:
Thereafter, I would need to build an executable, which, depending on the libraries upon which the project relies could be anything from straightforward to painful.
See also: * Open Source Is Not Enough * Empowered free software
Free as in ...? Points out that freedoms afforded by foss software to the average computer user are effectively the same as proprietary software, because it's too difficult to even find the source and build it, let alone make any changes. Advocates the foss developers should not think only about the things that users are not legally prevented from doing, but about what things they are realistically empowered and supported in doing.
Previously: Open Source Is Not Enough and Free software is not enough: on practical user freedom.
See also: "Even GNU's philosophy has a few puzzle pieces missing from the box."
If I’m curious about how something works, I can usually be reading the code within a few seconds.
it's usually due to the misapplication of healthy open source principles
The effect of handling open source the way it's popularly practiced on GitHub does not get nearly enough scrutiny for its role in e.g. maintainer burnout. Pretty much every project I see on GitHub does things that are obviously bad—or at least it should be obvious*—and neither are they sustainable, nor even a particularly good way to try to get work done, assuming that that's your imperative. It is probably the case, however, that that assumption is a bad one.
* I've slowly come to realize and accept that this stuff is not obvious to lots of people, because it's all they know—whether that means that that should affect whether its negative consequences are obvious is something that I'm inclined heavily to argue that "no, it shouldn't affect it; it should still be obvious that it's bad even then", but empirically, it seems that my instinct is wrong.
come with source code
Alan Kay at OOPSLA 1997: "It should travel with all the things that it needs".
See also: - Open Source is not enough - Actually portable executables - Package distribution is source distribution
that involves looking up where to find Guix's source code, `git clone`ing it, finding the Guix revision I'm currently on with `guix describe` so I can check out the same one for consistency's sake, `make`ing it, `guix environment guix`, using `pre-inst-env`, etc
This is a direct response to the question, so it makes sense to write it out, but Spitz's piece (linked earlier) Open source is not enough describes the problem adequately.