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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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[–] mobyduck648 6 points 1 year ago

Nah it’s totally within the spirit of FOSS to outright copy someone else’s project and modify it let alone write greenfield stuff that competes with it, just because we’re not in a traditional corporate/proprietary IP sort of environment here doesn’t mean there can’t be competition; in fact competition in FOSS is good as it drives innovation and improvement.