[parfe]

>I tend to think that the lack of openness is done on purpose

I doubt it. From my experience it's from outsourcing development to too many different groups with no coordination.

I worked on interfacing with a BigName's Hour Time Tracking module which takes hours to 8 decimal places. I submit the first payroll and hear it is imported with no errors.

Two days latter I get a frantic email asking me to resubmit because the Payroll module only takes 6 decimal places and was throwing out all the submitted hours. The systems are so large the consultants themselves cannot possibly understand it, let alone provide proper documentation.

[brendino]

That's a good point - enterprise software is meant to be customized to a business, so maintaining a strong repository of documentation is difficult, if not impossible.

However, I've noticed that even some of the core functionality is pretty light on documentation as well (and it is typically written in German-English).

[ultrasaurus]

True, I've worked at OtherBigName, and whereas we did make as much money off training as software, the documentation mostly suffered because writing good and useful documentation of spaghetti code is really really hard.