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Is it immoral to "1-up" an already existing FOSS project? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Since we're on lemmy, I'll use this as an example. If someone were making a GNOME (GTK4 + libadwaita) Lemmy frontend, and I were to start working on my own Lemmy frontend for GNOME, thereby competing with this already existing project for users, is that wrong? To make things more interesting, what if I wanted write my Lemmy client in Rust since I didn't like the original being written in Python? To make things even more interesting, what if that project is slow in development due to the developer not having a lot of time? My gut instinct is that it is immoral. I feel like I would be taking away a project that the author had sunk some amount of time in, hoping to impact others in a positive way. I understand there is no guarantee that my project does better than theirs, but I should still be conscientious of the possibility, right? Let me know your thoughts FOSS community.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Nah OP, that's just the nature of the ecosystem. We have more terminal emulators and text editors than we know what to do with and people continue making more. That being said, if your project idea is extremely similar to an existing project, you should check to see if the devs of that project would be interested in your ideas since you could collaborate with them if they are.