The opposite of NIH is Tinker Toy. You just glue existing bits together. This can work, but usually only on problems that have been solved before, and therefore

The opposite of NIH is Tinker Toy. You just glue existing bits together. This can work, but usually only on problems that have been solved before, and therefore have OSS software available. A good example I experienced personally is data pipeline / job management. Six years ago there wasn't much out there, and at Facebook they developed DataSwarm. Today there are many decent OSS choices out there, including AirBnB's Airflow, Oozie, and Apache NiFi which was developed by the NSA.