As an aside, the term of art is "make-or-buy" if you want to be able to Google it.
The discussion we are having is interesting because COTS are notorious for their hidden costs and how difficult they are to properly budget. Having to find a way to disable or reverse advance post-processing in a camera would be a fairly typical example of that. In this specific case it might mean having to commission a custom firmware from the camera manufacturer - something which is very much doable but might end up costing you as much as buying bespoke equipments for inferior results in the end.
Interesting, in software world I’ve always heard/used build/buy rather than make/buy, and I’m guessing that comes from construction industry as a lot of traditional software PM methodology was inspired by that world. If you Google ‘build vs buy’[0] (no quotes) all your top results are software discussions. If you Google ‘build or buy’, it’s all about housing. [1]
Make-or-buy seems more a term for manufacturing industry/SCM. TIL
As an aside, the term of art is "make-or-buy" if you want to be able to Google it.
The discussion we are having is interesting because COTS are notorious for their hidden costs and how difficult they are to properly budget. Having to find a way to disable or reverse advance post-processing in a camera would be a fairly typical example of that. In this specific case it might mean having to commission a custom firmware from the camera manufacturer - something which is very much doable but might end up costing you as much as buying bespoke equipments for inferior results in the end.