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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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[–] sibloure 1 points 2 years ago

No, it's not wrong. Think of all the users who would love your app. You would be benefiting many people by developing the app versus benefiting only one person (the developer) if you chose not to. And honestly I don't think the other developer would be so struck with grief because someone else was working on a similar project. The internet is large enough for more than one app and one developer.