> Everyone today wants to get the personal glory out of their own little pet project instead of getting the glory out of contributing important patches to exist

> Everyone today wants to get the personal glory out of their own little pet project instead of getting the glory out of contributing important patches to existing projects. Maybe you're right and it's personal glory. It could also be the (admittedly, often-naïve) assumption that maybe, just maybe, you have a better idea about how to do things. When John Resig [thought up jQuery](http://ejohn.org/blog/selectors-in-javascript/ http://ejohn.org/blog/selectors-in-javascript/) five years ago, both Prototypejs and Behavior.js were already around. If he had decided to contribute to those projects instead, we'd have a much different landscape today.