Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

Having already established that Forking is Legal, I felt it best to take the other end of the argument.(This was intended to be all one post, but at about 3000 words, it needed to be split up.)

Clarification here. Jigoshop is a product of Jigowatt. I call them Jigoshop in both my posts because it’s easier for my brain.

Gil Rutkowski remarked (without knowing I was already writing this):

Funny how people pick and choose between the “SPIRIT” of the GPL and its literal legal application to fit their argument. (@flashingcursor on Twitter)

We often sum up GPL as “Do what you want with this software. Just let other people do what they want with the software you make from it.” If you’re not familiar with it, I think I can sum up the spirit of GPL as “Don’t be a dick.” (Wil Wheaton in Exile) People get in a lot of arguments about the ‘spirit’ of things. You’ve probably heard someone complain “He’s following the letter of the law, but not the spirit.” Basically what that means is someone is obeying the law, but not what it means.

How can that even be? If the law is the law, then the law is the law and there should be no wibbly wobbly involved! It happens because of intent. The intent of the law in general is really something we shouldn’t have needed to be told in the first place, when you think about it. Primum non nocere: First, do no harm. Doctors are taught this, and you’d really think that’s self-evident! And yet, even the US Declaration of Independence starts out “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” If they were self-evident, why are we saying thing?

People are selfish. We care about ourselves first, then the people closest to us, and so on and so forth. To say the ‘spirit’ of the law means we’re no longer actually talking about the law as a legislative statute, but about the idiomatic application there of. We’re now talking about how we feel the law should be, which is pretty iffy territory. Talking about the spirit of the law brings up things like the moral ambiguity of the law, and the ethics we try to impose on others. What’s ethical for me may not be so for you, and so on.

So what does the moral aspect of GPL have to do with the recent forking of Jigoshop’s eCommerce plugin? Interestingly we can see how both parties ended up at the fork because they were selfish. Jigoshop didn’t want to give up control and neither did WooThemes. Neither was willing to concede, and in a way, they both ‘lost’ because of it.

Was Woo being a dick to fork the plugin? Yes. And no. You have to keep this in perspective.

You see, no one has made a ‘Killer’ eCommerce plugin for WordPress. Not even Jigoshop. From what I’ve been told, Woo has struggled to make their own killer plugin for eCommerce, and failed at it. I will leave it to others who actually use eCommerce on their sites to determine which plugin is queen, but I feel comfortable saying that taking someone else’s work, even when you credit them, can be a dick move.

At the exact same time that WooThemes is being a dick for forking, they’re doing a right thing. No that’s not a typo, they are doing A thing that is right. We all know that ‘hacking core’ for WordPress (or any app) is a terrible thing. Merging changesets is a nightmare, no matter what tool you use, and a fork makes it just as hard to incorporate changes. So would not a better solution be to make a WooTheme add-on plugin that just changed the parts of Jigoshop they didn’t like? A Woo/Jigo integration plugin?

That would be a wonderful, perfect world. Let me know when we get there. Sometimes the direction of a plugin is such that you have to fork it to do what you want. The developers don’t want to follow your dream of unicorns and puppies. Until we reach the perfect world, we fork. Now, it took a bit of reading to verify that WooThemes was unable to make their desired changes without editing core plugin code. That left them with only a few viable options. They could submit the changes to Jigoshop and hope for the best, or they could hack the Gibson. Basically, this was the best choice for WooThemes and really, nothing’s wrong with that.

The problem is that WooThemes is going to be making money off this acquisition. Their WooCommerce plugin will be free, just like Jigoshop, but just like Jigoshop, they aim to make a living off the plugin. Off someone else’s work. To be fair, that’s what I do. I support other people’s ‘stuff’ all the time. I’ve not written a lick of code for Windows in years (except DOS and PowerShell scripts) but their products pay my bills. Does that make me a thief?

No, it makes me an opportunist. WooThemes is being opportunistic as well. Remember how I said we are, all of us, selfish? Well so is Woo. They see a chance to make money and use a plugin that works, and not their own with a weird history. (Did you know Nacin was once going to head up WooCommerce before he was snatched by Matt? That’s fun to look at in retrospect.) Woo had a series of unfortunate issues with their own plugin, and it never worked right. They weren’t a dick because they talked to Jigoshop first (they didn’t have to), and I rather hope they said ‘Okay, we’re going to agree to disagree on the direction of the plugin and fork it.’ If Jigoshop first learned of the fork via Woo’s blog post, then they were entirely dicks.

Was Woo being a dick to ‘head hunt’ the developers? Yes. And again, No. Yet again, perspective is important.

I said before that the developers they ‘stole’ wouldn’t have left if they had a reason to stay. People leave companies all the time for myriad reasons. They also stay with companies for others. In the ‘traditional’ corporate world, people get a job and stay with it for a million years. In the freelance world, though, people switch jobs around a lot more. Even so, people only leave companies for three reasons:

1. They hate it here
2. They found something better
3. They were let go

That’s really it. So if someone chooses to leave a company, options one and two are there on the table, and you have to be honest to ask if they would have left if Woo hadn’t made the offer? And there’s where the dick move possibly lives. Was it Woo’s promise of skittles and beer that made them leave, or was there something wrong at Jigoshop? It’s far too early to point fingers at anyone, especially the developers who may discover they made a poor choice. You have to take risks, after all, or you never succeed.

WooThemes was dickish if they bribed away the developers. But they weren’t if this was just one of those serendipity moments. What if the developers said ‘Wow! Woo shares our vision!’ We don’t know, so we have to speculate, but either way, the decision was the developers and not WooThemes or Jigoshop, so any dickery actually belongs to the devs and them alone.

Since I was asked, my personal opinion is this: WooThemes pulled a dick move which in no way violated the letter or the spirit of GPL.

See the spirit would have been violated if, as another shop did recently, they lifted the plugin wholesale, made a couple tweaks, rebrand it, and released it without telling anyone. You know who I’m talking about here. That was violation of the spirit of GPL. But WooThemes was upfront about this. They talked to Jigoshop first, and everyone seems to have known what was going on before the news broke.

While I dislike that WooThemes did this, I will defend their right to do so (and Jigoshop’s right to be upset) until the day we all stop using GPL.

The whole reason I wrote the first post, however, was the high number of people I talked to who said that the spirit of the law was violated. It really wasn’t. Yes, these were dick moves, but the spirit of the law is the meaning, and the meaning of GPL is that you can’t impose more restrictions on a GPL product than it started with. No one did that. What Woo did was pretty shitty to their neighbor, don’t get me wrong, but it didn’t kill GPL. It hurt feelings and left a bad taste in the mouth, but that’s not the spirit of GPL either.

The Spirit of GPL is freedom. It’s sharing your work, working together, and when you take someone’s work, being open about them and crediting them. And while you don’t have to like what Woo did, they did not harm the spirit of GPL, because we’re all here, talking about it and still abiding by it.

I can but hope that the fallout from this is that we’ll finally have an eCommerce plugin that stands up as the best because of worth and not because that’s all we’ve got, but we’ll have to wait a couple of years for that to settle.

Update: This post is just about the legal aspects of forking. If you just want to talk about the morality of it, please go read The Morality of Forking.

You may have heard about this. WooThemes hired a couple of developers who used to work for Jigoshop, and forked one of their plugins.

Last week WooThemes announced the hiring of Mike Jolley and Jay Koster, as well as the forking of Jigoshop e-commerce plugin into the soon-to-be-released WooCommerce. Jolley and Foster previously worked for Jigowatt, a WordPress and Magento development shop, spending the last year working on the core of Jigoshop.(WP Candy: Jigoshop team and WordPress community members share thoughts on forking)

When you read it that way, it looks a little weird, doesn’t it?  Shady even. After all, this is a case of one company cherry picking ideas from another, and then taking developers to continue working on their version.

Here, read this view of events:

But of course, open source makes it so easy to simply “steal” someone’s idea and hard work.  And justifying it by hiding under the umbrella of open source and “legal” forking. (WooThemes Forks Jigoshop and they brag about it)

I’m going to go out on a limb here and present a point of view that many people will disagree with.

It’s not theft.

Freedom is a complicated, annoying, thing, and sometimes having a freedom means you accept the consequences of that freedom. In the US, we have freedom of speech, which means we can bitch about our government if we want to. But that also means someone else, who has the polar opposite of your views, has the exact same right you do. And I will defend that person with my dying breath that they have that right, no matter how much I detest what they’re saying.

You have to keep that in perspective when you start talking about rights and legality. WooThemes had the legal right to do what they did. That doesn’t mean you don’t get to think that it was a dick move, and you may, but what it was, was 100% above-board. They were honest about it, and it was legal. The GPL affords us the freedom to make plugins, fork WordPress if we wanted, and do what we want, so long as we don’t restrict the freedoms even more.

We pay a heavy price for these freedoms, don’t get me wrong. All freedoms have a cost. We all pay for them. Thomas Paine’s famous quote reflects on the ‘free’ part of open-source in a strange way: “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.” The core code of WordPress is free to us, and perhaps we devalue it for that price. Certainly the unrealistic expectations of many users is that this is a free product, and as such they deserve all things for free.

It’s possible that many people are dismissing this forking because hey, it’s a free world! WordPress is free, the plugin was free, the plugin was GPL, we’re all free to do what we want. But WordPress, when it hands us a dizzying array of freedoms in usage, is clearly giving us liberty that can be easily abused. It’s possible this is the case of abuse of that liberty. To judge that, we have to look at the whole picture.

Woo’s bid to buy out the Jigoshop project grossly undervalued the business and didn’t come close to covering our initial development costs, not forgetting the planning, time and effort both the Jigowatt team and community put into the project.

Woo then made to an offer to ‘collaborate’ which led to their decision to fork Jigoshop. What hasn’t been made public is that collaboration offer included conditions which would have given WooThemes full strategic control over the direction and development of the Jigoshop project in the future. (Jigoshop: Our Forking Views)

So clearly we can see that an offer of purchase, and collaboration, were made. They were felt to be not right. That was Jigoshop’s right and choice. Was it the correct choice? Only time will tell. That holds true of both Jigoshop and WooThemes. But up to this point, the whole deal is above-board, fair and just. And then WooThemes said ‘Well, they don’t want to work with us. That’s fair. We’re going to fork. And we’re going to take their core devs with us.’

This is still not theft.

See, WooThemes had no power to ‘take’ those devs unless Jigoshop undervalued them. That is Jigoshop esteemed their own developers too lightly. If the devs had been happy with their compensation, the direction of the plugin, and the company, they wouldn’t have left.

If you are a company with an open source project gaining momentum, your core developers absolutely must have a vested interest in your company. And not 1%. It has to be a good chunk of the pie. Enough that the developers feel your company is also their company. Then if another company comes along to hire them, the developer is much more likely to tell them, “Buy the company or take a hike.” (Lessons learned from the Jigoshop – WooCommerce fiasco)

In the corporate world, I’ve signed a contract that says, should I leave my company, there are jobs I have legally agreed not to take for 12 months following my termination. My contract also prohibits me from doing certain types of freelance work. Not that long ago, a friend complained that it wasn’t ‘fair’ that we were restricted like that. I looked at her and pointed out “No one made us sign these contracts. We read them, and we chose to sign them.”

I’m no stranger to signing NDAs and other documents that restrict me from telling you things like who banks at the company I work for. I can tell you things that are publicly known, but not things that are not. That sounds fair, doesn’t it? I also can’t blog about my company with certain details, and on pain of being fired, I can’t talk to the press about anything. I don’t have to like it all the time, but it’s something I agreed to and that’s a choice I have to live with. Many of my friends who work in other ‘worlds’ can’t understand how a company can restrict my private life. I point out that I signed a contract that promised I wouldn’t, and I keep my promises. If I didn’t, would I be the person they liked and respected?

No one here violated a contract, lied, cheated, or stole. So why are people chapped and are they right to be so?

Right and wrong are tenuous. What’s right for you isn’t right for me, and that’s a part of why we have the law, which defines right for ‘everyone.’ Of course, we all know that even then, right is subjective. The law is imperfect, we know this, that’s why we have judges and jurys who listen to the situations that surround illegalities and make judgements based on not just the black and white of a situation, but the entire picture.

What WooThemes did was legal and fair. End of story. We cannot stand and shout for the freedoms of WordPress and GPL without defending their actions. That doesn’t mean we have to like them. If this makes you decide to never support WooThemes or Jigoshop again, that’s your choice too, and one I will defend till my dying day. I feel that I should point out here that some people who are decrying WooTheme’s move are the same people who were all up in arms for Chris Pearson’s Thesis theme to abide by the GPL.

We live by the GPL sword, and we’ll die by that sword for as long as we stay GPL. The community clearly wants to be GPL, or we’d not have gone after Thesis with such animosity. That means we have to accept that sometimes what’s right isn’t what we would do. But then again, no one’s making you use the forked plugin.

Someone’s bound to bring up the fact that even Matt doesn’t like forking. That would be incorrect. WordPress is a fork of B2. Matt’s problem with forking is pretty easy to understand:

Forking is not usually ideal because it fragments the market for users

Notice how Matt doesn’t say he doesn’t like it, but that it’s not ideal? That does rather apply to this situation. By forking a plugin, you make two versions of it. Were we not all recently delighted when the TimThumb fork (WordThumb) merged with Tim to fix the problems? Were we not ecstatic when WPMU merged with WordPress to make MultiSite? Multiple plugins that do the same thing mean multiple places to have to patch.

And yet. There are already a handful of similar plugins out there. Having competition drives people to make better products and prevents us from resting on our laurels. It’s great you made the best plugin ever, but now what? It’s true this fork may be damaging to the community, and it’s true that it may have caused hurt feelings. But what matters more is where are Jigishop and WooThemes going next? How will their plugins make themselves notably different?

In the end, if you don’t like it, vote with your feet, but you owe it to yourself to defend everyone’s freedom with the same ferocity you defend your own. Even the people you hate.