Arch Linux

All the files under /etc/hostapd/ are just "example documentation configs" which are not suitable for production use. It is much more convenient to install them under /usr/share/doc/hostapd/ for the following reasons:

* Everybody using hostapd will have to modify the current configs in /etc/hostapd/. Users will hardly overwrite files in /usr/share/doc/ so keeping "example documentation configs" there will ease maintenance of short and much clearer separate config files.
* The decision to keep the configs under /etc/ is made in PKGBUILD [1], there is no indication from upstream that the files belong to /etc/ (Debian also installs them under /usr/share/doc/ [2]).
* Keeping "example documentation configs" with uncommented options might lead to unintended behaviour. Starting a service (hostapd.service in this case) before any changes to the default configuration are made should either work out-of-the-box or fail due to missing/faulty configuration.

For further reasoning please see https://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2014-May/036386.html

[1]: https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/hostapd#n55
[2]: https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/amd64/hostapd/filelist