This type of lazy thinking in generalizations amazes me. Inefficient at what? If you mean it's inefficient for rapid decision making, I wholeheartedly agree. If you mean inefficient at allowing people to express themselves, I disagree.
Fair enough - Open systems explore the landscape of all possible systems through diverse implementation and designs. This diversity sometimes leads to open systems finding the global optima, but even in less ideal circumstances the various different approaches reach a local optima for some subset of user needs.
Closed systems on the other hand try to reach the global maxima by analysis, design and 'vision'.
The original poster laments the competing implementaions, back stabbiness and ideologies. From my perspective that is how open source is supposed to work - people who are full of it trying to take their vision to its maximum limit. Competing implementaions and backstabbiness is not a modern phenomenon - bsd vs linux, emacs vs vi, xemacs vs emacs, n implementaions of scheme, n implementations of common lisp, ironpython/jython/python/pypy.
You bring up an interesting phenomenon: well-developed open source environments share a cut-throat competitive culture for consumer mindshare rather similarly to multinational corporations. I wonder if there is a scalability issue in human management where at some point we go berserk trying to define the mainstream.
As far as open source is concerned, it might be helpful to split the projects into two categories before examining their motives
1) Corporate driven projects. Here the need to reinvent might be due to profit based motives, or it could be because someone is trying to create work for themselves.
2) Volunteer driven projects. In this case I think it's the geeky need to understand things from first principle that drives the reinvention. The fact that for poorly documented projects the cost of reimplementation early on is comparable to rewriting from scratch doesn't help. Also large projects seem disorganized and bloated when compared against a new naive implementation with few features.
