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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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[–] rowinofwin 6 points 2 years ago

No, never. Diversity is the strength of open source software. Someone coming along and doing things differently to you is actually really helpful. Just remember that if you are both open sourced you can both see how each other solved a complex problem, fixed a bad bug, or made a performance gain. You won't be able to directly import their code but the back and forth is helpful for both of you.

That said, helping with an established project is generally a better idea than making a new one from scratch unless you have a clear reason to be different. Many hands make light work and if you can work with someone you may make something better together than you would on your own. Never let that stop you though, go have fun, make a cool thing, and if it turns out you would rather work more in a team you can bring what you learned from building your thing to another project later.