It generally means "apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem." -- definition taken from Wiktionary (which claims the etymology comes from a Ren & Stimpy episode).
But in this case the blogger seems to be misusing it to describe needless wheel re-invention by corporate IT programmers who could either have used an open source solution or bought in the tool that the blog post advertises to solve the problem. I wouldn't use the term in such cases.
More accurate usage of the term would be finding yourself updating your entire system to support some obscure dependancy of the open source PDF library you decide to install, or spending time trying to get a software purchase authorized via your office bureaucracy.
