I agree with the idea that many projects are just fun and stand on that basis, but the analogy doesn't work IMHO.<p>When you bake a pie, it gets eaten, so who cares if it's just like another pie, in fact it's probably great if it is. And the more people baking peach pies, the better!<p>The analogy should be with pie recipes. In that case, your pie recipe really should bring something different to existing ones. It doesn't need to be 'better' necessarily, but if it's essentially identical, there's no real point to the recipe, except for you to practice writing out recipes.