You might be familiar with deviantART as that place you go to find awesome wallpapers or Team Fortress 2 fan art. It is, primarily, a community for artists and creative types—people who like to draw and paint and sketch. But in early 2010, the site's developers wanted to try something new.

It dawned on company CEO Angelo Sotira that there should be a way for the community to create and publish new art directly on the site, with nothing more than a modern browser. The question, however, was to build or buy?

In other words, Devious Technology—the team responsible for all of deviantART's design and development work—could either develop the technology for a web-based drawing application themselves, or license or buy a piece of pre-existing software from someone else.

Sotira's situation was not uncommon. Even here at Ars, we often bemoan the lack of a good story scheduling tool, and wonder if it's worth building our own. In the end, deviantART launched its web-based drawing tool, called deviantART muro, in late 2010—and it was designed and developed entirely in-house. But it wasn't an easy decision to make.

"Whenever you're doing a buy versus build analysis, you typically want to buy," Sotira told Ars. After all, in many cases, you're not just getting the product, but the team responsible for its development too. "What you get is an expert," he continued, "and somebody that has some pattern recognition in the product, so that they know what's good and what's bad."

Initially, this was the route Sotira considered taking. The team investigated numerous other web-based drawing tools, but none of them quite seemed to fit with what deviantART had in mind. For example, they found most of the tools available at the time were built in Flash, which was slow and ill-suited for pen-based input. Rather, "HTML5 had become this label for cutting edge stuff," said Simon Murray, Devious Technology's director of product management, and the development team wanted to use that instead.

"It wouldn't be fair for me to say we didn't go out and further analyze the market—we did," continued Sotira. "We went and looked at all the drawing software that existed when we actually thought about building muro, when muro started to evolve."

It's important to note that other companies with other needs don't always come to the same conclusion. In late April, for example, Ars wrote about Google's decision to sell its SketchUp 3D modelling software to a company called Trimble, which sells mapping, geolocation, navigation, and surveying equipment and software. In this case, Trimble already had a suite of 3D tools it had developed in-house for enterprise use, but bought SketchUp to "enhance [their] ability to extend our existing market applications."

What's interesting is that, while deviantART muro wasn't directly acquired, some of the primary talent behind the project was. In 2005, deviantART acquired a website called DrawHere.com, which Sotira describes as "graffiti for the web." Users could essentially draw over other websites and share the resulting digital graffiti with friends. Sasha Lerner, now VP of engineering, and MichaelDewey, now deviantART muro's lead developer, were both brought on-board in the deal, but worked on other deviantART projects and tasks before the idea of a drawing app was even tabled. However, having that past experience already present within the company—not to mention the rest of deviantART's vast engineering team—meant that Sotira wasn't forced to hire additional staff to make deviantART muro a reality. They already had the skills within.

That's not to say there weren't still certain challenges during muro's development. Sotira says that, for a site as large as his, where all of the infrastructure is handled in-house, it was hard to lose the engineering efforts of people such as Dewey to something that wasn't related to the day-to-day infrastructure and management of the site. From the time development officially started in February 2010, it would take ten more months of work until launch. "You don't just get to swap somebody else in," Sotira said. "We felt that strain and that stretch of growth. But that's awesome."

In the end, deviantART believes the move paid off. The team was able to create a tool that fit with their vision, with input from across the company, and could be iterated upon over time. Just this week, for example, the team launched Redraw, a new version of deviantART muro with a tweaked interface, and more importantly, the ability to playback every brushstroke in a piece of work and see the artistic process from start to finish.

"Any piece of software that's not designed with the vision it intends to fulfill in mind is going to be a piece of software that has to get rebuilt anyway, in order to fulfill that vision," says Sotira. And while buying or licensing a pre-existing piece of software might have satisfied the company's short term needs, he believes the extra time and effort needed to develop an in-house product were worth it.