There are people that I call software hippies that go on and on at every change they get about how open source software is so awesome and there's free love and it cures cancer and whatever. And they always talk about how cheap it is and how you're sticking it to The Man or Microsoft (or "M$" as the tools would say). There's no point in arguing with them, but they are completely full of shit.
Anyone who has worked in any kind of software development or IT environment knows that the biggest costs come from having warm bodies on the payroll. Compared to them, the cost of software you pay for is a rounding error.
But the bigger cost comes in all of the time you spend f'ing around with open source stuff because so much of it is poorly documented. I spent a good chunk of today trying to get an open source and free rich text editor to work with my blogging application. Dropping it in there to make it edit text was a five minute process. Trying to integrate it so it would use the custom image storage component of my app took forever because there were little to no examples of how to do it right. Frustrating as hell. And Javascript-based stuff is so black-box to begin with.
In any case, I figured it out, and now I can go back to writing code that I understand. I suppose these goofy little struggles build character, but I've got nothing left to give tonight. And that sucks because I really want to make meaningful progress with some hours in front of me. Just ain't gonna happen.
I agree with most of the points you make in this post. I love OSS but every other project I look into has poor documentation like you described (or none at all). If someone described why they use an open source application as 'sticking it to M$' they should be slapped.