Interesting link: In defence of NMH syndrome - the author argues that companies that redevelop everything from scratch rather than reusing other software are doing the right thing, because they are not forced to accept flakey behaviour in their programs arising from problems `upstream' in the library. Open source development offers a workaround for this - you can participate in the developer mailing lists for the library, feed in patches, whine about problems, and generally be more involved than it is normally possible to do between companies.