At a previous job we had the choice of buying a library for a couple grand from a field expert in said library or spinning one of our Senior engineers who clearly costs the company more than a few grand a year on rebuilding the same thing. Hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted (think about the management time, not just the employees own time) to build something in let's say a year, where said developer could of used the few thousand dollar library and done much more productive work to generate something of value.
Now they have to maintain a fork instead. What's worse is they likely wont know how it works in a year's time, imagine in a few years when they need him to update the library.
Sometimes it's better to buy a library than to waste resources reinventing someone else's tried and tested wheel.
