The lack of high level docs up to the point of open sourcing was partly due to prevention of copycats but mainly due to lack of resources (chiefly time) to spen

The lack of high level docs up to the point of open sourcing was partly due to prevention of copycats but mainly due to lack of resources (chiefly time) to spend time writing. We were a small team and time spent on documenting stuff we all understood pretty well was time spent not chasing customers or improving our product. Later: well, there is a Hyperscan paper and there may be more material coming out later. Also, not to be a jerk, but a lot of people claim that they will read/understand/use this kind of documentation and my experience was that only a fraction actually do, and of those fraction, most of them don't behave in a way that's actually useful enough to justify having made all those docs. One is more likely to wind up with people kibitzing and making inane tweaking suggestions ("use more NFAs! no, use more DFAs"); less likely is meaningful OSS contributions or using the software when they might not have before.