Woothemes forks Jigoshop - is this ethical?

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.

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".

Totally agree, not to mention its very hypocritical considering WordPress itself a fork of B2. It seems to me that people are happy to embrace GPL when it suits them, but condem it when it doesn't suit... When you build on an GPL product you accept the freedom it provides, both good and bad.

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).

There's nothing in the law that says you can't walk up to a child with leukemia and say "HA HA! You're dying!".

The reason for this is because unrestricted free speech is very important, and some day it may become vital for you be able to speak in a way that hurts people's feelings. Therefore they do not restrict emotionally hurtful free-speech in the law. (except in cases where it overlaps with other considerations...but don't lets get too bogged down here.)

However I think we can all agree that it would be an incredibly shitty thing to do.

Software licenses in that respect are like the law. They are there to lay out practical matters. The reason for allowing forking is because the ability to do it in certain circumstances is important....if a product is abandoned or what-have-you, a fork can save it.

However, just like hurting someone's feelings forking is something to be avoided unless truly necessary. (obviously this is somewhat subjective). In that regard, the blog author is 100% right. Forks are stigmatized (in some communities) and this is how it should be for a variety of reasons both practical and social. Forking without a good reason is something of a Jerk move.

Some people seem to think if you release under a fork-permissive license it somehow welcomes all fork-related behaviour and I think it's a shame. I would say this is no more true than publishing your phone number is an invitation for mean-spirited prank-calls. Sure they will happen, and one should expect them (or at least not be surprised), but that's an entirely separate question from whether or not they are a morally or socially acceptable thing.

I would note however that I'm not familiar with this particular situation at all, and it could be the forkers DO have a good reason. In that case it's unfortunate, but that's the reality....sometimes you want or need to take a project in a certain direction and the project founders won't cooperate. In that case I would say a fork is justified.

I don't even think the bar for "justified fork" should be very high, but it's definitely higher than "the license allows forks"...and I think we should always fork reluctantly. It should be viewed as the slightly less desirable option.