I suspect these are trial balloons. Throw a few relatively low-value, potentially interesting projects out there and see if the open source community will play along.
And before "Johnny Vegas" can call it wasteful, remember that the contract they are working on may stipulate "is not IP encumbered in any way", so they have to reinvent the wheel. Also, this may have been part of a larger program where they needed something that did just this, and customizing an existing project might have taken about as much engineering time as writing something from scratch.
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