Sounds a bit like http://www.servalproject.org
I’m a big ham radio nut, and although the premise of the hobby is the advancement of radio technology, everyone’s old, has their own way of doing things, and has reinvented the wheel many times over. Logging programs, DX clusters, remote radio interfaces, APRS programs and apps, satellite trackers, you name it, there’s a dozen versions of everything.
I imagine this is common in technical hobbies.