Even if he is planning on spending a lot of time on it, he will probably: 1. Be doing something he loves 2. Gain experience and improve his skills 3. Expand hi

Even if he is planning on spending a lot of time on it, he will probably: 1. Be doing something he loves 2. Gain experience and improve his skills 3. Expand his portfolio 4. Makes friends and connections and get valuable feedback 5. Learn what it's like to try to beat a competing product 6. Maybe fail, and learn from it 7. etc. "similar functionality has been around for a long time" That doesn't matter to a lot of people in a lot of situations. We just keep on coding. If this thread was entitled "Show HN: The new karthikv OS" or "Show HN: Introducing the Google Search killer", then yeah, spending a lot of time on that kind of thing (especially for free) might be foolish.