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Woothemes forks Jigoshop - is this ethical?

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Re: Woothemes forks Jigoshop - is this ethical?

#11

Post by nbpoole »

tptacek wrote: post #7

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

> 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...

Re: Woothemes forks Jigoshop - is this ethical?

#12

Post by 5hoom »

lachlanj wrote: post #8

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).

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).

Re: Woothemes forks Jigoshop - is this ethical?

#14

Post by armandososa »

lachlanj wrote: post #8

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).

I think many people are jealous of WooThemes because they are doing a lot of money selling WordPress themes, succeeding where many people have failed.

Re: Woothemes forks Jigoshop - is this ethical?

#15

Post by 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!

Re: Woothemes forks Jigoshop - is this ethical?

#16

Post by 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?

Re: Woothemes forks Jigoshop - is this ethical?

#17

Post by 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.

Re: Woothemes forks Jigoshop - is this ethical?

#18

Post by badgergravling »

freddealmeida wrote: post #5
lylejohnson wrote: post #2

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 fo…

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.

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

Re: Woothemes forks Jigoshop - is this ethical?

#19

Post by badgergravling »

nbpoole wrote: post #11
tptacek wrote: post #7

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

> 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 actual…

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/

Re: Woothemes forks Jigoshop - is this ethical?

#20

Post by badgergravling »

5hoom wrote: post #12
lachlanj wrote: post #8

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).

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).

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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