Reminds me of the old expression: "fast, cheap, good. pick two."
When we were largely buying shrink wrapped software they almost all came with decent sized manuals (quality varied, of course). He tagged the post with a bunch of open source projects, which has almost never been an area of good manuals. It's very uncommon for "scratching your own itch" to lead to comprehensive documentation for obvious reasons. Developers seldom write the extensive manuals, tech writers do.
I think his point was more that clearly the developers want people to use what they built. So taking that extra step and writing good documentation would only help ensure that people used their software. Not doing so actually hurts their chances. Not doing so and expecting SOMEONE ELSE to do it is just dumb.
When we were largely buying shrink wrapped software they almost all came with decent sized manuals (quality varied, of course). He tagged the post with a bunch of open source projects, which has almost never been an area of good manuals. It's very uncommon for "scratching your own itch" to lead to comprehensive documentation for obvious reasons. Developers seldom write the extensive manuals, tech writers do.