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.
Sounds like you have a great opportunity to collaborate on technical details, etc… but still have separate projects. More power to you!
Now if you got more specific and the other author happened to have beat you in a student council election then I’d say it’s probably time to forgive and forget.
Nah OP, that’s just the nature of the ecosystem. We have more terminal emulators and text editors than we know what to do with and people continue making more. That being said, if your project idea is extremely similar to an existing project, you should check to see if the devs of that project would be interested in your ideas since you could collaborate with them if they are.
If it’s free, it’s not competing.
If you want to make something, go ahead and build it.
Artists don’t compete with other artists
If it’s free, it’s not competing.
The more popular project will most likely receive more monetary and code contributions. So they are competing for survival.
Artists don’t compete with other artists
I see that you spent no time around artists
Steve Jobs attributed the quote “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” to Pablo Picasso.
However, the original adage seems to originate from 1892
“Great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.
Steve Jobs was a great enough artist that he even stole the quote holy shit 🤯
