"This is a common perception that regularly makes me laugh. I
usually respond that all software has deficient documentation and
lacks support! It’s true some open source tools
lack documentation but others, for example MySQL, have exemplary
documentation. Some open source software communities are hard to
get help from and others fall over themselves to help people out.
I’m always immensely proud of how the Puppet
community, which is largely made up of some of the busiest people
in IT â€" sysadmins, goes out of its way to help
newcomers and share knowledge.
"Of course this same problem is present across enterprise and
commercial software. Otherwise authors wouldn’t
be able to sell books offering insights into using commercial
software. :) It’s even perhaps somewhat worse
for enterprise software where submitting a bug request can lack
transparency and where examples of how others have solved issues
can be hard to find or perceived as proprietary information."
