Free and Open Source Software

18251 readers

7 users here now

If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Gaywallet

alyaza

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

submitted 2 years ago by haroldstork@lemm.ee to c/foss

40 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] nihilx7E3 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

imo yeah it's one-upping by technicality, but it isn't wrong. so long as you're not specifically bullying or bothering the original project/author, it's ok to want to make something yourself. if your new project ends up having more users, it sucks for them but oh well - it's not like you're intentionally shoved them out of the space, & others certainly won't see it that way either. even in the case that the other project is developed slowly because the dev doesn't have a lot of time, well, that's not really your fault either, nor is it a reason to sit there & not make anything else.

also remember that open source is a collective, not a competition - just because two projects do the same thing doesn't mean that one has to win & the other has to be pushed out. even if two projects do the same thing, their goals & the method they use to achieve it can be different enough that they still both serve a purpose & are important to have around. using the example in your post, the other gtk lemmy frontend could be geared towards power users & take on more of an advanced style with a bunch of plugins, extensions, etc. where you could go the opposite & simplify/optimize for touch friendliness. i've seen a projects before that chose to acknowledge that they do the same thing but have different goals & help each other out by committing to the other's project & giving each other shout outs so it's definitely possible to coexist