1. it provides a recipe to approach (scientific) questions
  2. let’s you cook up a (scientific) answer
  3. you can use it as a black box (like an orbitrap)
  4. you can refine existing methods (well, some can, others don’t)
  5. it has an error (but I do not believe it is normally distributed)

Now, to me it’s trivial to work put how Open Source supports this.