It amuses me IT management is ok to pay millions in terrible software license fees (i.e. most of Oracle products), but not ok to budget a couple of millions to have a team develop some of that internally. Also another amusing fact is that most IT managers never wrote a line of code in their lives. IT should not just be about expensive vendors and outsourcing for labor cost arbitrage.

If terrible software fail it's fault of vendor and blame goes to said software and vendor. If internal development team fail to deliver needed software it's always fail of IT manager who can be fired. It's all that simple.

Also it's the classical buy vs build.

Ok, given the size and budget of CERN, it's probably cheaper for them to develop things in house. But maintaining a team of people not at the heart of your activities is always a bit challenging from an organizational point of view. For example, as it's not core for your activities, in case of a budget reduction, this team will likely be reduced, re-purposed or removed, leaving a lot of their services unmaintained with no bug fixes and difficult to operate by IT.

It's also less battle tested than off the shelf software, so you will hit all the common traps before having a stable solution.

And open-sourcing the code is not a magic bullet. Even if the code is open-sourced, the likelihood of the project building a community of users and external contributors is quite small.

That being said, sometimes the offering for off the shelf software is just so bad that it's preferable to implement it in house. Or you have an idea that, even if not core to your business/activities, could provide a competitive advantage/huge gain in efficiency. But to pull that off, you need to be well ahead of the curve, have smart people in-house and significant resources to dedicated to that (CERN actually crosses these boxes). But it's also likely the world will catch-up and you will then be stuck with your in-house solution lacking features and reliability.

> given the size and budget of CERN, it's probably cheaper for them to develop things in house

It's not just their size, it's that they're doing something that no one has done before. When you're building a me too product or even a version 2 of something, maybe buying makes sense. But when you're doing something for the first time, and you're not even sure what will work (e.g., CERN), by definition it's impossible to buy. If you could buy it, someone's already built it.

Generally, the more uncertainty around the business model and potential solutions, the stronger the case for building. Conversely, sometimes the larger and more bureaucratic the institution, leads to slower iterations and experiments. Because of these two seemingly contradictory points, when a large company wants to do something unknown and relatively uncertain, they buy an entire company, provide them resources, but try no to interfere too much (see, e.g., GM buying Cruise).

Consultants often come in with papers that prove that these solutions save money. It just never happens and you end up with expensive, barely working services like SharePoint.