Yes. This. It's also a matter of what people are willing to pay for. Even (or perhaps especially) in commercially supported software, cleanups only happen i

Yes. This. It's also a matter of what people are willing to pay for. Even (or perhaps especially) in commercially supported software, cleanups only happen if there is a strong business case for the cleanups. And if the cost of buying an extra build machine to run long complicated configure scripts is significantly less than the engineer time to re-engineer a new autoconf system from scratch, in many companies (and certainly most starupts) --- it won't happen. The OP cares very much about code quality as a good and important thing in and of itself. But that view isn't shared by many business people, or by many programmers in general, for better or for worse. Some have argued that OSS code tends to actually be _better_ about code cleanliness, because it's public, and people do care about making sure that their code is clean. (I've never seen the proprietary source code for the Oracle DB, but there are many stories out there about how horrible it is from a code cleanliness perspective.) Also, the OP seems to care a lot of lots of extra library dependencies. The big problem here is that a lot of people don't really care if their package uses perl or python as part of their build scripts/makefiles --- or even if their package uses perl _and_ python scripts. The OP cares, but for better or for worse, most people don't. And I would wager this is likely true at most companies where programmers are paid to maintain the source tree as well!