Sometimes people release software for others that allows them to get a jump on development, sort of them giving back to the community while pushing their company's name.  Other personal people just release stuff to futher their own development, and that of their software.  It's all good for us devs that are looking for a start on something and don't have the cash flow to just start throwing money to the wind.

The problem I've noticed is that a lot of these free packages suck in terms of documentation, and sometimes have missing files in their distro's.  This blog itself had poor documentation to get it setup.  It's as if the person put together a kick ass free piece of software and then just gave up and said “they'll figure it out on their own” when creating the documentation.  In fact, certain portions of the documentation were wrong! 

The other day I was looking into encoding video for the web.  I downloaded AutoGK because I had read from other people's reviews that it was a pretty newbie'ish product.  I mean, I don't want to spend all day creating a video for the web, I'd much rather click and wait for a computer in the back room to just do it for me.  Sure the program works ok, but when I was installing, certain files were missing!  What the ass?  My bullshit meter jumps up a few notches when certain programs don't work as advertised, especially if it's the installer!  I mean, is this product going to suck or what, if I can't even get it to install correctly?