> If we're talking about open-source (I can't see why not), you can just fork the library in question and adjust it to fulfill the missing 5%. You're not wrong

> If we're talking about open-source (I can't see why not), you can just fork the library in question and adjust it to fulfill the missing 5%. You're not wrong, but you are assuming some things: 1. That the library is written in a language suitable for the task. E.g. if you're doing real-time programming you probably don't want Visual Basic and if you're doing security programming or text processing you probably don't want C. 2. That the library is written well enough to read. You'd be amazed how much truly bad code is out there. It runs, but … it's not good. OpenSSL is an example. 3. That the library is architected in such a fashion that the 5% functionality can be added without major rework. The functionality may be small, but adding it might require quite a lot of architectural change and refactoring.