Woothemes forks Jigoshop - is this ethical? • Hacker News Board

Post by tptacek » Fri, Aug 26, 2011, 3:16 PM UTC

badgergravling wrote: post #19

nbpoole wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/

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.