Pure Ignorance Or The Not-Invented-Here Syndrome?

I just finished listening to this .NET Rocks episode with guest Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror fame. I can really identify with a lot of what he says and what he propagates on his blog. One topic was brought up by Richard Campbell I think, when he mentioned that nothing else hurts him more than watching a 60K or 80K developer working on problems for months or years (not to mention whether successfully or not), when there are existing solutions available either free in terms of open source projects, or as commerical products priced at some hundred bucks. Jeff wholeheartedly agreed.

They hit the nail on the head. I don't know whether it's pure ignorance or just the infamous Not-Invented-Here Syndrome, but this just seems to happen again and again. For my part, I blame decision makers approving budgets for such projects just as much as developers who try to solve problems that have been solved a hundred times better a hundred times before.

Here are some examples:

• Why not implement my own Database Diff tool? See RedGate SQL Compare and SQL data Compare.
• Why not implement my own O/R mapper? See Hibernate.
• Why not implement my own XML parser? See Apache Xerces.
• Why not implement my own XML binding? See JAXB.
• Why not implement my own HTTP protocol? See package sun.net.www.http or Jakarta Commons HttpClient.
• Why not implement my own Java Enterprise Framework? See Spring Framework.