That's why I'm a capitalist: if an American computer firm told their best employees "we're scraping this project you love and are building IBM 360 clone", the e

That's why I'm a capitalist: if an American computer firm told their best employees "we're scraping this project you love and are building IBM 360 clone", the employees have had the option of going elsewhere. Indeed, exactly this happened many times. On the other hand, I've heard many horror stories of similar goings happening with regards to technology at NASA/JPL and other tech-heavy government agencies: a great project gets built in house, it gets scraped because it isn't "up to WS-management standards and best practices and uses customized open source and not off-the-shelf commercial software". I call this the "not-invented-elsewhere syndrome", which can be just as pernicious as the more familiar NIH. am hoping recent debacles like healthcare.gov failure will get governments to revisit the way they look at building software.