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.
Lmao my dude. It’s perfectly moral to take a FOSS project, fork it, and release your own version based on their code. As we can see from the recent RHEL drama, it’s also perfectly fine (from the perspective of the community) to clone someone’s project, rebrand it, and release it as your own.
Why do you think it would be immoral to write an app from scratch that does someting similar to an existing one, while having better foundations and running orders of magnitude faster? That’s called healthy competition…