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

submitted 1 year 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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[–] crank 2 points 1 year ago

If you think the original codebase is salvageable and you have the skills to help out I think it is nice to make contributions to it.

However there are lots of reasons why someone might start their own project even when one exists. Learning experience, compatible existing skills, personality, philosophies, goals, target audience/community, workflows...

I think you are worrying too much. There are a bazillion tools to accomplish tasks especially in FLOSS. FLOSS embraces the fork. The rewrite in another language (rust has a bunch of these). New iterations on previous work (eg ag "The Silver Searcher. Like ack, but faster" off the top of my head). And many alternative tools for any possible use of a computer. Have you ever looked at a list of window managers or text editors or todo lists? Endless. Some FLOSS projects even list alternative applications in their documentation.

You could as a courtesy reach out to the dev of the existing project and introduce yourself and say some nice things like how they inspired you. But I do not know if this is really the done thing. (Not a programmer here.) It might come off just as self-promotion. Maybe someone else can give an opinion on that.

Just be sure not to shit talk the other developer or their work. Just talk about what you are doing.

To go with your example of lemmy, I'd point out that there are numerous mobile clients in active development. Are all but 1 on each platform "immoral"? Is the kbin dev immoral for producing an alternative to lemmy?

If there is only one existing tool to get the job done, and the person who develops it is really just way too busy to maintain it, or it is for any reason not a priority in their life any more, they might even be relieved to learn someone else is making an effort to fill the gap. It might lift feelings of guilt for not doing more to keep up their work.