Glib answer: I think there is a good reason many dot-com companies died a messy death...

But seriously, building on top of powerful tools such as Perl/CPAN, IrcII, Procmail and Apache makes tasks like these almost trivial. Commercial companies, for various reasons, often seem to ignore the wealth of free software available and reinvent the wheel again and again and again. One of these reasons is probably fear of the GPL - but I think people are usually just ignorant.