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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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[–] greybeard@lemmy.one 11 points 1 year ago

Lemmy and Kbin both fill the same niche. They can coexist peacefully. There is nothing wrong with trying it your own way. One of the great things about reddit was the app ecosystem that allowed all users to pick their favorite. My favorite was BaconReader, which wasn't particularly popular, but really worked for me. I'm glad that the developers of BaconReader didn't decide the market was already too crowded.

I would recommend anyone making a Lemmy app, especially open source apps, document the stuff that was hard for them in making the app so others can learn and not have to fight the same battle.