Not necessarily (just) ego. It's also that greenfield is much, much easier than brownfield. You can make your own decisions, rather than first having to learn what others decided for you. You can start with a naive blue sky vision of the product, not yet tainted by all the complexities that will only surface when you really get into the weeds of the problem you're trying to solve.

> After all, that's a problem already solved: CLAs for open source.

With CLA's in place contributors usually sign away their copyright, often to get rug-pulled when an open source project reaches a certain maturity and popularity, and the commercial plans are activated by the company behind it. Better look for community-driven projects that come with a DCO [0] instead.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Certificate_of_Origi...

> Take for example, the bajillion expenses tracker apps. The most reinvented wheel. Do we need yet another one?

Well, small projects being repeated is one thing, but because they're small there's only so much waste there.

I'm thinking more about "cathedral-like" projects, some massive open source project that lasts for years, in which it may be important to emphasize the contributions of, and a particular way of understanding the contributions of the many stonemasons and lesser artisans, as opposed to the leadership of the project and the architects.

Our whole society would benefit I think by having more respect for the "average person that contributes to the common good, even if they're not the leader", and actually praising that as much or more in some cases than the leadership role.

> The whole reason to pay for software is to offload the liability to a 3rd-party. In simpler words: "As a company, I have this need and I don't want to solve it myself. Also, if I pay someone, I can sue them on contract breach just in case."

Ah management-style cover-your-ass engineering. Which doesn't work even with things like IBM contracts, never mind with anyone smaller. The problem is what they actually guarantee.

When you actually investigate the question (because you were a Google SRE and you move to a smaller company, and obviously disaster preparation starts with knowing what happens when disaster strikes): "Say, really smart manager, what does the contract actually say happens when you need the cover-your-ass provisions? Let's say AWS fails to give us machines. Let's say this software doesn't deliver. Let's say the bank connection we're paying for breaks". First observation: the managers (at a very big European telco) don't actually know the answer to this question. Or they pretend not to (I'm pretty sure they just lied to me, didn't care about anything but the checkmark, and did in fact know they did not have any option for disaster recovery because their developers had told them many times).

Answers: AWS doesn't give you a cent back, under any circumstances, does NOT get your servers back online but MAY give you 20% reduction on your future bill (and for customers in the UAE with the Iran war, they didn't)

Software doesn't deliver, then we don't have to pay the last milestone payment (10% of the cost), and the supplier does nothing anymore.

If the bank connection breaks, nothing happens. You are forced to keep paying anyway. Although, I guess you get the transaction cost for free because there won't bee any transactions. I do hear there's a small problem with that.

So, obviously, no, this does not cover the company's ass at all. It's about a manager being able to say they very cheaply did something. What will happen to the company in case of actual problems? It'll immediately cease to function, and none of these cover-your-ass provisions will matter at all. Which is, of course, what happened about 4 months later and the company's new SREs were expected to fix the shit ASAP, without ANY help from the "service" part of these platforms. We had to buy new services to get it fixed, once the service was down senior management literally got involved and approved the purchase orders, yelled at a bunch of infrastructure teams to make changes they never would and the company never got the money back from the "guaranteed" platforms. It cost about 15x, for that year, what it would have cost to have 2 providers for the service, and I'm sure that more than covered a development team for the software. And thank god we at least hosted our own source and made sure local builds worked.

By the way: they just switched to the newly ordered much more expensive platform. About 3 weeks later, focus was moved away, by management, from repairing stuff and so the ability to switch back was ... just dropped.