
Woothemes forks Jigoshop - is this ethical? - badgergravling
http://blogforprofit.com/wordpress/woothemes-forks-jigoshop/
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lylejohnson
I'm an advocate for OSS in many circumstances, but you have to understand that
one of the consequences of open-sourcing your software is that things like
this can happen.

I can't tell if the blog's author is upset so much about the fork as he is the
idea that someone other than Jigowatt is making money off of this plugin. The
whole Git and GitHub ethos has certainly removed a lot of the stigma once
associated with forking.

~~~
freddealmeida
I agree. I certainly don't see anything wrong with forking a project if the
licence allows it.

Of course, I never understood why there was a stigma attached to forking in
the first place.

This article is a bit unnecessary.

~~~
badgergravling
There's nothing wrong with forking, and it's clearly allowed under the GPL
licence, and is legal and above board.

But there are good reasons for forking - for instance, if the code has
languished for ages, and there are forks which split the potential development
and user community. There's always two sides to every story, and I'm involved
with Jigoshop, but certainly Jigoshop/Jigowatt supported a team of developers
to work on a project which resulted in two of the team leaving just as the
stable version was about to be released, there was a low offer of acquisition
of copyright of the product, and an offer of collaboration which had certain
conditions attached to it, so would not have been workable, and forking is
being used as a business mechanism, rather than a method of evolving the
software

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orangecat
I fail to see why I should be outraged about the forking of any OSS project
whose license specifically allows forking.

~~~
ryan-allen
I agree completely. All I can see here is people generally misunderstanding
the whole purpose of licensing.

OSS licenses might be about ethics in spirit but in practice it's about law.
Releasing something GPL and crying foul when someone forks it is akin to being
outraged and then admitting that you "didn't really read the contract".

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tptacek
Not only does the license allow for this, but aren't the people doing the fork
for Woothemes the core authors of Jigoshop?

~~~
nbpoole
> _In the last couple of months, Jay & Mike have been responsible for the
> development of Jigoshop, an exciting new commerce plugin for WordPress, as
> part of their previous employment gig at Jigowatt. We have decided to
> continue the development work on a forked version (that’s the Wikipedia link
> if you’re unsure what forking means) of Jigoshop, which will now be known as
> WooCommerce._

So yes and yes. The comments actually clarify the situation a little bit
beyond that (apparently this fork _was_ their last resort):

[http://www.woothemes.com/2011/08/the-good-stuff-new-team-
mem...](http://www.woothemes.com/2011/08/the-good-stuff-new-team-members-
woolabs-woocommerce-plugins/#comment-71106)

~~~
badgergravling
Hi. Just to clarify, Jay and Mike were important members of the team, but not
the sole developers involved, either internally, or from the wider development
community.

And the prospect of forking was mentioned throughout any offers, which were
not close to being acceptable for a variety of reasons -
<http://jigoshop.com/blog/2011/08/26/our-forking-views/>

~~~
tptacek
I'm not sure I see your point. Retaining talent is a problem for all software
businesses. If a key product of yours depends on a small number of people who
can be recruited, well, you should have been doing more to make those people
happy. It seems specious to complain that Woo didn't offer enough money for
your business when the real kernel of value in your business was on the market
ready to be hired away.

We've lost awesome, awesome people from Matasano to better paid roles
elsewhere; some of those people even compete with us now. We're not going to
whine about it. I'm glad I got to work with them at all.

------
jjm
If you don't want anyone to fork then don't OSS it no? Unless you have laws
stopping people nothing else will. Surely finger waving won't help. I don't
like what is happening but If it was me I wouldn't have OSS'd the project.
Just that risk you take.

I really don't see morals ever stop anyone from trying to make a buck on the
internet. Spammers, Mac defender scams, Big copy cat companies (you know, the
guys that just go right out and wget your entire site recursively), Groupon
(had to throw that one in), or whatever else you got. Nuts I tell you.

I hate to say it, but no one is going to remember you for OSS'ing or even
forking a project. So it can go either way for both groups.

In the end people are only going remember the one that make the most noise
(functionality, service, even drama). If woo takes off then people will
quickly forget Jig.

Seriously, who remembers b2/cafelog? You know, it was a project later forked
into something called WordPress. I'm sure you all know WordPress!

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shabble
From a quick scan of <http://jigoshop.com/licence/> it looks like it's
licenced as GPLv3. Unless I'm misunderstanding something fundamental about how
the GPL works, any fork is going to have to be published under the same
licence (or can they exert proprietary control over the specific changes they
make after forking?)

Assuming the former, and that the new fork must also be GPLv3, I can't see
there being a huge problem, the original devs can always merge in features
from the fork into their version (although it sounds like they've been hired
to work on the fork anyway)

What does this achieve other than a rebranding exercise?

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rickmb
Just a thought: we're talking about WordPress plugin code here. Anyone ever
tried to collaborate on and add features to code like this:
<https://github.com/jigoshop/Jigoshop> ?

Any value judgements aside, it is just very hard to touch this kind of PHP
spaghetti without breaking it, let alone add functionality unless you
completely own the code.

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5hoom
From a software engineering point of view, isn't reusing components considered
a Good Thing?

It seems logical to fork instead of reinventing a whole bunch of functionality
(this assumes you are adding new functionality of your own, not just
rebranding which is pretty sleazy).

Anyway, it _is_ under an open license so... what did the Author expect?

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lachlanj
It's interesting how most comments on this thread have no issue with the fork,
yet most of the comments on the blog post are very much against the fork.
(Strange considering they are mostly from the WordPress community).

~~~
5hoom
Maybe it's because there's more of an awareness here of how much the developer
ecosystems we all depend on are built from Other Peoples Code.

From the languages & compilers to the frameworks & API's, every day we stand
on the shoulders of giants who made it all possible (written on a machine
running a commercialised fork of BSD).

~~~
badgergravling
That's true, but it's also the case that unecessary forking can lead to
confusion and potentially damages both projects by splitting the support
between them.

After all, is it Open Source, or Free Software ;)

(written on a machine running Windows, sat next to a machine running Ubuntu)

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code_duck
It's perfectly ethical. Is it socially acceptable seems to be the question.

If Woo didn't have luck with their own product, will they do well with this
codebase? A lot more goes into running a project like this than just the code.

