Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
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You can look at it the other way around too: Linus made a kernel, and enough people liked it that people developed Linux distributions, and it kept growing.
A lot of FOSS projects started as someone's personal project they released (sometimes literally just to have stuff on their GitHub to be more hirable in job search) and it became insanely popular rapidly and now it powers entire ecosystems.
Not all projects starts with the ambition to become a big thing, and that's usually how the really good stuff starts off as.
The Lounge started off as some users getting interested in Shout, which was just some guy's pet project) and we forked it because we had a pile of patches for it to fix issues with it. I worked on it purely to serve my own purposes (just enough to IRC on the go without dealing with reconnecting to ZNC all the time and draining battery), and now it's an active project a lot of IRC networks use as a guest client for their IRC network. No intent to disrupt the IRC clients landscape, I still used HexChat back then, but now it has secured a permanent spot in my open tabs as it does for many people. It's actually a pretty good IRC client now.