Yes, you can see it as wasted effort, but this is a key component of open source. Projects are built on the ideas and code of other projects. Sometimes this is a joint effort of a community, and sometimes it's done by a single developer who wants to try something different.
And this is great. There's growth in experimentation and failure, and trying new ideas. Not everything is going to succeed, and not every project will seem like it was worth the effort.
Ultimately, the user benefits by the overwhelming amount of choice of software, but it can also degrade the experience as projects might not be well maintained, unstable, and sometimes even abandoned.
This gives the opportunity for companies to step in and focus on supporting only a subset of software, which can lead to a better user experience, with the tradeoff of users having less choice, and being forced to use their computers in a specific way. These are two different approaches, and one is not inherently better than the other.
Yes, you can see it as wasted effort, but this is a key component of open source. Projects are built on the ideas and code of other projects. Sometimes this is a joint effort of a community, and sometimes it's done by a single developer who wants to try something different.
And this is great. There's growth in experimentation and failure, and trying new ideas. Not everything is going to succeed, and not every project will seem like it was worth the effort.
Ultimately, the user benefits by the overwhelming amount of choice of software, but it can also degrade the experience as projects might not be well maintained, unstable, and sometimes even abandoned.
This gives the opportunity for companies to step in and focus on supporting only a subset of software, which can lead to a better user experience, with the tradeoff of users having less choice, and being forced to use their computers in a specific way. These are two different approaches, and one is not inherently better than the other.