I wasn't really referring to the major releases, but rather the daily snapshots. Commercial vendors, as you've pointed out, don't make much of their work public. The only way you can tell if the bug YOU reported was addressed is if the "next release" doesn't exhibit it any longer. Major releases often come about every two or three years. Microsoft, for example, seems to releases a new version of Windows, and a corresponding set of "Office" tools about every three years.

Some vendors only partially repair some bugs. I could list many, but they're limited to the stuff that I routinely use, and that might not interest many people, but some get fixed in the doc's one year, and a few years later, and after many irate emails from me and others, get fixed in another segment of the package in another year. In the meantime one can only proceed with some pretty ugly workarounds.

It's not pretty. The vendors are, after the first releases, for the most part, trying to make money, while the open-source community just wants to produce useful tools. I've seen it happen more than once, that a seemingly good software tool is presented by a company, becomes successful, and the company is bought up by a megacorp, after which the quality goes down, down, down, for want of resources and dedicated maintainers.

RE