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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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[–] ondoyant 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

FOSS shit is built to be reproduced. if you wanted to fork somebody's project and build your own thing on top of it, that's in the spirit of open source. if they didn't want it to happen, they wouldn't use a FOSS license. if you can do that, then building your own thing that does similar stuff is certainly not a problem. FOSS isn't competitive, its collaborative. everybody who contributes is doing a good thing, even if that's by building more options for people.

[–] sailsperson 3 points 1 year ago

Completely agree. It's not immoral or wrong to reiterate on a project using a different approach or different technology - it's encouraged, I'd say, or at least welcome.