Generally (always?) open source documentation is not as good as commercial software documentation as not many would like to do it (for free) and it can be very tedious to do.
Exactly. In closed source environment there are people paid for writing documentation and they are NOT the same people implementing concerned technology. And because you HAVE TO write the documentation and you DON'T understand it, you have to find out (and consequently provide usable output). In open source world implementator of the technology is by default skilled in it so it's almost standard that documentation written by him is unusable for mere mortals. And because no one is paid for it, others, who menage to understand the technology, are not motivated to share with others - if they can understand it, others can too... (There are honorable but rare exceptions.) So while highly skillful/motivated/crazy/etc are following open source, the crowd is following closed source. Sad true :/ The open question is who will have more influence in the end.
JZ
PS: My primary development platform - Mozilla. My primary documentation - MS Platform Inet SDK... (And xulplanet.com and zvon.org :)
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