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submitted 1 year ago by haroldstork@lemm.ee to c/foss@beehaw.org

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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[-] mrGarbanzo@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

I'm reminded of a time I found myself using an open source tool on github and finding it severely out of date on sources of information it was using to operate. I made a fork, spent a few hours updating, committed that code and put in a pull request with the original developer so they could merge it back into their original. 5 Years later, no response. 🤣

People abandon projects for various reasons or only work with the scarce free time they have. You may find someone interested in a healthy competition, but it might be more likely they back off when they see someone pick up the torch and do what they no longer can.

this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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