RedMonk analyst Stephen O’Grady took off from my Do you want to be in the software business? post and discussed why we’re seeing so many Web businesses roll their own platform components rather than building on the standard LAMP or Java/J2EE/RDBMS stacks that have dominated in the past. Great stuff:

Until the last few years, when more accessible languages, cheaper hardware, and a growing catalog of open source software assets led firms small and large to question the status quo. To decide, on a volume basis, that the available frameworks, development tools, databases, operating systems, and so on weren’t quite right for their needs, and that rolling their own was preferable. And that, once built, they could amortize the costs of developing these assets if they made them publicly available. Which has led to Rackspace contributing to Facebook’s Cassandra, Facebook contributing to Yahoo’s Hadoop, and IBM contributing to all of the above. The days of rolling your own are back for some portion of the would-be enterprise software customers, if not for the same reasons as in the past.