Everybody has already heard about the famous metaphor “Reinventing the wheel”. It’s most of the time a good advice. However, what happens if your’e not reinventing a wheel. But let’s say… a wing. A wing is a device that moves though a fluid and produces a usable force called lift, it can be a sail or a fin, it might go straight or make rounds. Compared to a wheel, the problem it solves is much more complex and the domain to which it applies is vast and various. Thus the problem has numerous good solutions. That’s why “reinventing the wheel” only applies to very simple problems, sub-problems or very narrow domains, certainly not the domain of operating systems. Reinventing can be motivated by other reasons, like pedagogy or copyright issues but that’s another subject.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/aldeck/2010-03-30_reinventing_wing/