[raganwald]

Rewriting a browser isn't impossible either, as Firefox proves. Perhaps SO is an order of magnitude easier than a browser, but I stand by my suggestion that copying an existing application you didn't actually write is often much more difficult than expected and has led many teams to their doom.

[davidw]

My comparison was "writing something from scratch" vs "copying". If a team has trouble with copying, wouldn't "writing it from scratch" be even more likely to end in failure?

Also, with something like SO - you can pretty much see the models, and how they interact. That's already giving you a lot.

[dinkumthinkum]

That's interesting. However, there are already several clones of SO and a couple that reproduce the vast majority of the functionality.

[wlievens]

You can't even check that, because a significant part of SO's functionality could be hidden from you.