[cjaybo]

> every OSS starts off crappy and full of bugs and usually not even close to finished.

I think the quality/bugginess isn't as much of a factor as the fact that the codebase was not written with the intention of becoming OSS. Things like lack of documentation, hard-coded secrets, inflexible hosting/deployment, etc. are difficult to account for after the fact. And if you ignore these things and just "throw code over the wall", then virtually no one will even look at your code, let alone use it. Kind of a waste of time just to indulge a few self-righteous commenters on some message board, if you ask me.

A lot of OSS software was written with the intention of being open-sourced, so many of the things that make open-sourcing a previously-closed repo difficult are considered upfront.