I have been meaning to write these thoughts for a long time. Finally got to it.
I have now been working with open source projects for at least past 4 years. Using and tweaking lot of FOSS software, writing some of my own applications and libraries and releasing them under GPL, working on BSD licensed libraries at my day job until few months back; and not working full time on my project that is completely open source.
I am pushed to think about my real reasons for liking open source, when I hear some blind justifications for open source and/or unsubstantiated rant against open source (comparing Openmoko Freerunner with iPhone, see the endless threads on Openmoko mailing lists)
Over time I am starting to believe that "Open" is not the only aspect that makes the source useful or popular or better.
"Open" is an absolute term. "Easy" is a relative term. An open source code is accessible to absolutely anybody - whether they know the jargon or not. Whereas, the open source code is "easy" only to the people who know what to make of it.
The Openmoko phone has the goal of complete openness, so that anyone can tweak it. It can be used to do wonderful experiments. But due to the nature of the technology, there are only few who can do these experiments. Making a device open is not going to make it popular. Also making the device closed (yet shiny) is not going to make it popular either. Yes iPhone is closed, shiny and popular; but they had to open it up to 3rd party developers to enrich device.