The main cause is that commercial software is often so terrible. There's plenty of open source junk. Nobody uses it, though, so you don't hear about it. When somebody generates software to deal with important issues, people will use it. If it doesn't work well, the fact that it is important will motivate the open-source community to deal with it. If the initial software is commercial, and the open-source stuff puts the commercial vendor out of business, it's because the commercial product isn't good enough to compete. A commercial product has to have value. If the value, meaning the many man-years of solid effort, isn't there, someone will sit down and write something better in a weekend, or in a month. If it is that easy to put the commercial enterprise "under," then that's where it should be.

True, documentation for open-source software, e.g. LINUX often lags 90% behind what's currently distributed. It often lacks key words, e.g. 'NOT'. Comments in some of the source code are from v0.11, while the currently released version itself is 265.52.

However, you can ask the guy who wrote the open-source stuff a question, while the guys who generated app XYZ for Windows retired a decade ago, at age 20-something, and you know how good a piece of work those guys often turn out. That's why the commercial app sucks and will never be improved. It'll be "updated" every couple of years, because that's how the publishers make money, but the rubbish the kid who wrote it generated was not well understood by the folks who bought it, so it will never be fixed.

SDCC's as good an example as you need to consider. It works, at least it works well enough to have a pretty significant user base.

I doubt that there's any way to get better doc's for LINUX, but then, what do you get with Windows?

RE