Recently I was looking at an open source project to contribute to however after going through the ugly code base (which seems to break quite a bit) and reading some things about the current maintainer I decided it would be a good fit for me.
Right now my thinking is to just start a new project with the same goal but using a different set of technologies that I think fit the problem better, the only reason stopping me is avoiding second system effect given the fact the system is live and works.
I could contribute to the other project and in doing so avoid essentially creating two different solutions to the same problem or I could solve the problem the way I think it should be solved and then see which system gets more traction. Is there some prior art to these circumstances that I should be aware of when considering this decision?
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Have the best of both worlds. Fork the project. As long as you’re not wanting to switch to a more permissive license(such as GPL to BSD), it’s all legal. This is what open source is all about!
By forking:
- You’ll have the existing project as a starting point
- You have complete control over the project
- You can “contribute back” your changes to the existing project if they’ll accep tthem
- You can brand it the way you want
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