I would agree, this was very common 3-5 years ago, I’ve seen a few projects go this way. I think lots of people have got the message how and the situation is getting better. There are a couple of problems I still see however. #1. The developers that are already in this mindset and are now leading teams, as this article discussed. #2. As another comment highlighted, the teams that have to work with these systems now.

Ignorance in that it doesn’t occur to someone that there are viable open source alternatives because of an overall impression that open source is somewhat lacking in quality from commercial alternatives, which they’ve deemed too expensive to utilize (when in fact, the opposite is almost always true especially for larger open source projects). This is typically a problem with older, more grizzled IT veterans who experienced a very young open source environment back in the day.

The other is ego. They want to implement their own framework, api, persistence layer, simply for the sake of learning how to do it or feel that they can do it better for the specific requirements that they have.

I do however feel that the overall landscape is changing. Open Source no longer holds the stigma it held 20 years ago and companies are getting smart about adopting it.

That’s a fair point, so would it take you more or less time to pay for their software instead of rolling your own? It’s not about if the software is free or not, it’s about writing something that already exists and having to maintain this, potentially forever.”

If you dont want to fork out a considerable amount of money on an application that does the job then i see the only option available to you is ‘reinventing the wheel’ so to speak.”

If that’s the case, fine, but at least you have thought about this and rationalised it. If you feel it’s your only way forward go with it, but don’t think it’s the only option!”

In addition some requirements you require are simple that buying in or even using an overly complex opensource solution just makes no sense.”

Again that’s all down to doing some decent research. The project that was featured in the article was pretty straight forward at first. Then another round of requirements came along. Then another round, rinse and repeat. If you are getting into these cycles you really have to question if this effort would be better spent else where in the business. Are you making any money of these efforts? Are you losing ground or money because of them.