In my own opinion, sometimes it is good to reinvent the wheels and not just sticking to the existing. Reason being that if we saw old, good and reliable open source programs that serve for a good purpose going down the drain, we simply contribute to the owner by reviewing and adding more codes to his program then release a newer version of the software.

Newbies need to sometimes learn around the production of some already existing applications so as to gain more experiences in tweaking, reproducing or updating them within their GPL Licences for their personal use.

There are more reasons for this but let me hear from you on what you think about it.

oho, for newbies yes. I believe it is good to learn the generic stuffs, then later after you know your left from your right, then
you can now start cutting corners.
I notice many trends with newbies: like a fresh starter going straight into:
- joomla
- dreamweaver
without knowing basic html, and then you give them a script and they cannot follow simple instructions to install it into their site

Good to know that people are beginning to see beyond the sweet sounding phrase "no need to reinvent the wheel". I advocate and advise anyone that can to freely reinvent the wheel if innovation must not die.

We must not let innovation die. Jquery just got to 1.4 and soon they'll upgrade again. Gmail got their platform topping by trying to social network her mailbox as simple and user friendly as possible. Facebook is busy doing theirs. All is improvement and they build on an existing thing. All day we cry for a better and user friendly even nationwide accepted and used payment gateway yet we've none. None in the sense that the existing ones are just meant for a particular group of people; the elites but what about PayPal? Can't we work out something like that for Nigeria? People will say it is reinventing the wheel but isn't it a good idea to do it and save some big stress? Another instance is this trend of Web2SMS websites. Every guy & lady next door needs one but the issue is, can't something new get into those platforms than the usual text messaging? Innovation is the key. We can reinvent the wheel and make life and things easier and better.