Opensource Documentation

John O’Conner raises a good point – Opensource projects tend to have poor documentation. Java tends to have good documentation (IMO, the best documentation I’ve seen for a programming library). Will Opensourcing Java reduce the quality of it’s documentation? The obvious response is that Sun and IBM etc will still be investing so their doc writers can continue writing the documentation just like now. Except that most of the documentation for Java is written by the same people who write the actual code within Sun – at least that’s the impression I get. If people outside of Sun are writing code it would be up to them to document it – how well would that be kept up if there was no performance review checking up on them?