of us who remember time when it was completely normal for car owners to work on and repair their own automobiles still fondly remember huddling with friends under the hood of camaro in my youthtweaking and customizing its engine with little workwe could make it as fastflashyand loud as we liked moreovera breakdown in one of those older cars wasn' necessarily the end of the world there was at least some chance that could get the car going again on my own that' not quite true today with the introduction of electronic controls and diabolically cramped engine compartmentscar owners are usually better off taking their cars back to the dealer or another repair professional for all but the simplest kinds of changes by and largecars are no longer user-maintainable products and if have breakdown in my shiny new ridei' probably going to be completely stuck until an authorized repair person can get around to towing and fixing it like to think of the closed and open software models in the same terms when use microsoft-provided programs such as notepad and outlooki' stuck with the feature set that large company dictatesas well as any bugs that it may harbor but with programmable tools such as pyedit and pymailguii can still get under the hood can add featurescustomize the systemand work my way out of any lurking bugs and can do so long before the next microsoft patch or release is available ' no longer dependent on self-interested company to support--or even to continue producing-the tools use of coursei' still dependent on python and whatever changes it may dictate over time (and after updating two , page books for python xi can say with some confidence that this dependency isn' always completely trivialhaving all the source code for every layer of the tools you depend onthoughis still powerful last resortand major net win as an added bonusit fosters robustness by providing built-in group of people to test and hone the system at the end of the dayopen source software and python are as much about freedom as they are about cost usersnot an arbitrarily far-removed companyhave the final say not everyone wants to work on his own carof course on the other handsoftware tends to fail much more often than carsand python scripting is generally less greasy than auto mechanics pyedita text editor program/object in the last few decadesi've typed text into lot of programs most were closed systems ( had to live with whatever decisions their designers made)and many ran on only one platform the pyedit program presented in this section does better on both countsaccording to its own tools/info optionpyedit implements full-featuredgraphical text editor program in total of , new lines of portable python codeincluding whitespace and commentsdivided between , lines in the main file and lines of configuration module settings (at releaseat least--final sizes may vary slightly in future revisionsdespite its relatively modest sizeby systems programming standards complete gui programs