[karmajunkie]

>> Don't write it unless you intend to own it. > The flip side of that is that if you do want to own it, writing it in-house may well be a better option.

An unspecified question is "What is the cost of ownership?" (which you alluded to in discussing the size of the project.) I've written plenty of code that could have been replaced by a library. I've put out OSS projects that I actively discourage people from using because the function of the library was so straightforward that its just not worth the dependency (even if its my own, completely flawless code ;) ) Moreover, in most of these cases the code churn even over several years is almost zero. That's a metric that should be looked at a lot more often when evaluating dependencies.

To your point, the cost of ownership is completely negligible in most cases, and all developers are doing by including a new dependency is saving a small amount of time up front with a heavy backside cost.