I am a bit fed up with software less because of malleablity but because of the cloud walled gardens. I can't open my Google doc in something else like I can a pdf in different programs. Not without exporting it.

This for me interested and I found remotestorage.io which looks very promising. I like the idea that I buy my 100gb of could storage from wherever then compose the apps I want to use around it.

I hadn't thought of malleable software... that's a whole other dimension! Thanks for introducing this as a concept worth talking about. Of course I have heard of elisp and used excel but haven't thought of it front and centre.

In terms of cooking ... I feel like cooking is easier potentially as for the most part (some exceptions) if I know the food hygiene and how to cook stuff then it is an additive process. Chicken plus curry plus rice. Software is like this too until it isn't. The excel docs do a great simple budget but not a full accounting suite. With the latter you get bogged down in fixing bugs in the sheet as you try to use it.

I think it is good you are researching as these could be solvable problems probably for many cases.

Something I have always thought about is sometimes it matter less if the software is open source than if the file format is. Then people can extend by building more around the file format. A tool might work on part of the format where an app works on all of it. I use free tools to sign PDFs for example.

Since the last decade or so at the latest, software is often designed as an explicit means of power over users and applications are made deliberately inflexible to, e.g. corece users to watch ads, purchase goods or services or simply stay at the screen for longer than intended.

(Even that was already the case in niches, especially "shareware". But in a sense, all commercial software is shareware now)