Huh? Atom/Electron is another great example of GitHub duplicating a ton of existing projects (whether dependencies such as CEF and node-webkit or high-level solutions such as ACE) without seemingly having any interest at all in joining those existing projects. Just because someone is successful at doing this does not make what they are doing any more reasonable: if anything it should just put them in a similar place in your mind to the Microsoft of the 90s which many people here would denigrate. GitHub's model of "open source"--the one which it is, devastatingly, teaching to an entire generation of developers--is only about code being available as opposed to being about community and collaborative design. Asking if one would prefer an alternative where the code is simply kept closed source ignores the premise of the compliant: that the code being an advertised separate project undermines the premise that working with an existing project to solve a problem tons of those users almost certainly also have. :/
Open source does not entail any responsibility to work or not work together with any pre-existing project. What you describe is more cathedral than bazaar. There are thousands of possible reasons, from architectural choices to personalities, that someone may have not chosen to work with an existing project. I will not fault them for giving me a superior result, for free (in both senses). To compare this with Microsoft in the nineties is sheer madness.
Or maybe they wanted to spend their energy actually solving their problems rather than trying to persuade the maintainers of other projects about their approach. For example, could they have proposed some changes to IPVS to get rid of multicast for state sharing? Maybe. But then they'd spend all that time arguing with other users of that project about the relative merits of each. Instead they built a new solution and users now can have a choice, including the choice to take some of these ideas and apply them to the other projects if they are clearly superior.
I would accuse them of NIH if they simply reinvented another wheel when there was a perfectly acceptable solution already out there. But it doesn't seem like that was the case. Instead they clearly evaluated the existing solutions, found shortcomings, and decided to solve those problems for themselves, and then publish the resulting code. I see nothing wrong with that approach.
