I'll never understand the FOSS mentality of "There's already a quality project out there with active development and most of the user-share. Perfect, so I'll utilize my off-time to create my own inferior competitor and fragment the users instead of contribute to the existing one".
I mean, I get it if the existing project maintainers start acting with shady interests - the threat of the fork can be a powerful tool. But it seems like many of these alt projects do it right out of the gate. Meanwhile, it took linux desktop how long to get a functional wifi driver out of the box??
Likely what happens is that while the existing options are fine for the masses, a power user has a specific use case that is not covered by said options, so they create their own program to fit their specific needs. Eventually this new program evolves into something that is also useful to the masses, and that's how we get to where we are now with several good FOSS options.
A lot of it is just difference in vision. FOSS projects often have an owner and they might not be open to switch the direction of their project or be willing to maintain a large feature that someone wants to contribute.
there is also the “I rewrote it using Rust/Go/whatever because that makes it better” people.
I'll never understand the FOSS mentality of "There's already a quality project out there with active development and most of the user-share. Perfect, so I'll utilize my off-time to create my own inferior competitor and fragment the users instead of contribute to the existing one".
I mean, I get it if the existing project maintainers start acting with shady interests - the threat of the fork can be a powerful tool. But it seems like many of these alt projects do it right out of the gate. Meanwhile, it took linux desktop how long to get a functional wifi driver out of the box??
Likely what happens is that while the existing options are fine for the masses, a power user has a specific use case that is not covered by said options, so they create their own program to fit their specific needs. Eventually this new program evolves into something that is also useful to the masses, and that's how we get to where we are now with several good FOSS options.
A lot of it is just difference in vision. FOSS projects often have an owner and they might not be open to switch the direction of their project or be willing to maintain a large feature that someone wants to contribute.
there is also the “I rewrote it using Rust/Go/whatever because that makes it better” people.