to be unique or not

Way back in 2004 I created serversniff
* to help myself managing and doing my pentests
* to help others checking their sites
* to help myself understanding stuff. cryptology, protocols etc
* to help others understanding stuff. cryptology, protocols etc

and finally, to create something unique and new.

Why should i reinvent the wheel, why invest time to offer services that others already offer for free?

I'm a bit puzzled about the occasional inquirys to "donate" sourcecode for somebody's public site. People are not ashamed to ask for ready-to-run code to implement serversniff's functions on their sites. And no, it's not just one or to mails coming in with such requests. Anyway, i still see serversniff as more or less academic, and primary educational stuff. I give out advice, concepts and snippets of code as long as the request is friendly and nice.

But still: It wouldn't come to my mind to ask anybody to donate code of his website so that i can implement it in any of my sites. I'm still eager to learn necessary stuff before i start coding php-scripts, i'm still committed to create unique services that aren't to be found anywhere else in this flavour or quality.

While serversniff's script use crappy php-code and the server itself is unstable like a one-legged stool i'd never try to release a service unless i'm convinced that it has something unique or does its job better than all other sites.

Maybe there's just somehting wrong with my mind.

tom