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.
The people I’ve worked with on FOSS projects don’t do it to be famous or capture market share. They do it because it scratches an itch they had; it’s something they needed and decided to give back.
Large projects by huge megacorps have incorporated the OSS code I worked on into their own projects. Did it bother me? Sure, a little. Mostly because people just assume that the ideas and work came from the benevolence of a big tech company rather than someone who just enjoys seeing others problems solved.
You do you. If it makes you feel good to write something: go for it. If it gets popular? Cool. If it doesn’t? That’s okay too, you still have something that works well for you.