How Hard Can It Be?
http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/HowHardCanItBe
Of all the reason that people get sucked into rewriting software, the one that drives me craziest goes like this: “Well, there are a bunch of versions out there, yes, but they all suck. So we decided to write our own. How hard can it be?”
Well, I dunno, it can be hard enough that a bunch of other people tried it, and their versions all suck. [...] And unless you have a clever insight they didn’t have, your version is also going to suck.
