[to3m]

I personally believe that "decades" would be an exaggeration.

As to why people don't open source their libraries - it's a big hassle and doesn't especially benefit them personally. Indeed if other people are going to have to spend time reinventing the wheel I suppose some might even see it as a competitive advantage. And as a general rule, video games companies don't seem to be much into open source anyway.

(Additionally, if the ones I've used are anything to go by, the libraries aren't so great. They attack specific problems with std::vector, and that's fine, but usually not in any general way. No need to do a full extension of the allocator mechanism if you know you can just call your company's allocator's special try_realloc function, for example - but now of course nobody else can use it. And there usually isn't any impetus to "fix" this, because it isn't actually a problem.)