I'm not sure I 100% agree. I've been thinking a lot lately about the cost of off-the-shelf solutions from the perspective of sustainability, and there is a cos

I'm not sure I 100% agree. I've been thinking a lot lately about the cost of off-the-shelf solutions from the perspective of sustainability, and there is a cost beyond money. The performance of software almost always degrades over time. By buying Foo off-the-shelf, you are saying, "I am ok with getting on the same bloat-dictated hardware upgrade cycle as Foo." Of course you have the option of buying Foo and never upgrading, unless Foo has a license that forces you to. But that also walls you off from security bugfixes. But by replicating the essential features of Foo in-house, you can actually set and stick to a complexity and performance budget. Of course if you are a business of any real size, you're already on the hardware upgrade treadmill anyway, and probably all of your customers are too, so what does it matter if your software is a little slower and a little more resource hungry year after year after year? Other than maybe a little twinge of guilt every now and then.