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

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

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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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[–] jboyens 3 points 2 years ago

The people I've worked with on FOSS projects don't do it to be famous or capture market share. They do it because it scratches an itch they had; it's something they needed and decided to give back.

Large projects by huge megacorps have incorporated the OSS code I worked on into their own projects. Did it bother me? Sure, a little. Mostly because people just assume that the ideas and work came from the benevolence of a big tech company rather than someone who just enjoys seeing others problems solved.

You do you. If it makes you feel good to write something: go for it. If it gets popular? Cool. If it doesn't? That's okay too, you still have something that works well for you.