[winxordie]

You bring up an interesting phenomenon: well-developed open source environments share a cut-throat competitive culture for consumer mindshare rather similarly to multinational corporations. I wonder if there is a scalability issue in human management where at some point we go berserk trying to define the mainstream.

[dman]

As far as open source is concerned, it might be helpful to split the projects into two categories before examining their motives 1) Corporate driven projects. Here the need to reinvent might be due to profit based motives, or it could be because someone is trying to create work for themselves. 2) Volunteer driven projects. In this case I think it's the geeky need to understand things from first principle that drives the reinvention. The fact that for poorly documented projects the cost of reimplementation early on is comparable to rewriting from scratch doesn't help. Also large projects seem disorganized and bloated when compared against a new naive implementation with few features.