[development] module duplication in Drupal contrib

[Daniel F. Kudwien]

Just to throw my experience into this discussion - I primarily see two
reasons why developers rather create new projects instead of joining forces:

First and foremost: An existing project does not adhere to Drupal Coding
Standards, contains almost no or meaningless documentation, or does not use
Drupal's APIs.

Second: An existing project looks and "feels" unmaintained.  Its issue queue
is bloated by unresolved and even unrecognized issues.  If there are any
follow-ups from the maintainer, they tend to be meaningless or ignorant.

While the first one is a technical one and may be prevented/solved by
automation (scripting), the second is more related to the personal opinion
and/or available time of a maintainer, which can only be clarified in a
discussion.  AFAIK, we don't have a dedicated container at d.o to publicly
discuss only such project/co-maintainer topics, where everyone is able to
track them (RSS) and participate.

Recently, I've seen a third cause for duplicate projects: New/novice Drupal
developers who do not seem to check contributions for already existing
projects - or - developers who wrote a custom module for client/project xyz
without checking contributions for similar modules/APIs up front, which they
really want to contribute back, possibly only to gain some "contributor
points".

Daniel