The reason I think that folks who build their own stuff are right is that they understand their problem domain better than anyone else. The author says communi

The reason I think that folks who build their own stuff are right is that they understand their problem domain better than anyone else. The author says communication could have cut their time down considerably. That may or may not be true. Getting into a debate with an external project about what should or shouldn't be the correct way to fix/change the external projects code can be a huge drain on time and mental energy. You can't fault a group for deciding not to bother. Not to mention that if you become the person responsible for a piece of an external project you are suddenly not just supporting your use of that piece you are supporting everyone else's use of that piece. That leads to more debating/discussion about the right way to do it. If you have to find a way to scale fast it might actually in the long run be less time to just write it yourself for your specific needs not an entire communities needs who have different scaling issues than you and different goals. Many times One size does not fit all and convincing someone else of that is just too time consuming to try. The author did bring up an interesting point about friendfeed developers not even trying to communicate though so I can understand what prompted him to write the article.