Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: copyright

  • Fork With Restraint

    Fork With Restraint

    I love that the GPL lets you fork. In fact, two of my plugins are forks and one’s an adoption. I think that’s one of the best things about GPL, the freedom to adapt and move on. But every single time you fork a plugin, you cause a couple problems that many people are either ignorant of or just don’t care about.

    Confusion

    If you look up ‘WP Grins’ there are three plugins. ‘WP Grins’ is the original, ‘WP Grins Lite’ is the first fork, and ‘WP Grins SSL’ is the third. Each one is pretty explanatory. The plugins are similar, but you get the idea from the title what’s different. And in each case, each forker took the time to say ‘this is what’s different’ in obvious ways, and to credit those who came before. This is important because, based on name alone, there’s not a whole lot to differentiate the plugins.

    Multiple ‘things’ with the same name is confusing. That’s really very obvious isn’t it? That’s why companies spend hours and months fighting to protect their trademarked names. The name of a ‘thing’ is important, and the difference between the names is the crux of everything. In a predominantly text world, your name is everything.

    Bad Feelings

    This is where it gets weird. As you all know, I’m a huge supporter of forking. But sometimes when you fork, you’re a dick. There are a lot of weird things to consider when you fork, and for me, the first one is ‘Is the plugin I’m forking something you pay for?’ Generally speaking, if I’m even considering forking a for-pay plugin, I’ll try to start up a dialogue with the developers first, because I know that these people are trying to make a living, and I’m a dick if I take that away from them. Yes, GPL says I can do it anyway, but there’s the law and then there’s the community.

    A lot of the time we tout the ‘spirt’ of GPL and I really hate that. We’re actually touting the cohesiveness of the community. That we know plugins are often free, but pay for support, or behind a pay wall, or a million other things. But. If you take away someone’s ability to make a living, you are a raging dick.

    Strong words, but ones I firmly believe in. It’s no secret I’m not fond of the IncSub folks and their behind-a-paywall/yearly fee for plugins. My issue isn’t their code, however, or their prices, but their attitude. And while I don’t like them, I will support till my dying day their right to do it. And if someone logs in to their site, gets an account, downloads everything and then puts it up on their own site, well, I’ll support IncSub in kicking them while they’re down, because it’s just not nice.(This actually happened in November 2011.)

    As Jane Wells put it:

    The GPL does allow for redistribution of GPL code. You can even charge for it if you like. However, here at WordPress.org that sort of behavior is not encouraged or supported in our repo. If you redistribute, we expect to see modifications not available in the original. We show respect for the authors of GPL code by only promoting redistributions that are useful as new contributions through helpful modifications.

    Which is why, when I forked the plugins I did, I made clear changes. Works on SSL now! Works on Multisite! And none were pay-for.

    But what does ‘being nice’ have to do with this?

    It Pays to Be Nice

    WordPress’s strength is their community. It’s the people who dream and invent, and the GPL has given those people tremendous amounts of freedom to be creative and expressive. Where WordPress runs into problem is personality conflicts and clashes (even the smartest people can be assholes). And where you will see the most of those conflicts and clashes is when it comes to GPL and who has the ‘right’ to do whatever. (Second only to GPL is SEO.) Once you incur the ire of a community, your ‘cred’ drops amazingly. That’s why so many of us are accused of ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’ when we tout the GPL party line.

    A quote in my comment ‘guidelines’ is from Lord Buckley, “If you know what to do and you don’t do it, there you bloody well are, aren’t you?” We all know the right things to do are to be good people. To respect each other and treat our fellow man with kindness. I don’t care what religion you are, or even if you worship the FSM. The only way we all get through this thing called life is to be decent people. Taking away someone’s source of income is rarely nice, and when you do it and say ‘I did this because it’s GPL and I can!’ then you’ve done it for the wrong reasons. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. We all learned that as children, that just because I can throw a rock at Timmy’s head doesn’t mean I should.

    Theft

    When we get to college, many of us experiment, for the first time, with being able to walk away from things we don’t want to do, even though we should (like your classes). And many times, these young adult challenges, where we do the wrong thing, come with no serious repercussions, and we determine that it’s okay to break some rules. This curious attitude follows us into adult life. It’s okay to steal cable/music/movies because the companies that provide them make a lot of money, and the artist never sees it anyway, so we’re not hurting the people who really matter.

    Taking someone’s product that is for sale, making a change and giving it away, is perfectly acceptable in the GPL. But that doesn’t make it right. That makes it legalized theft, and it will hurt your standing in the community. And that’s what people mean by the ‘spirit’ of GPL. You and me and everyone else who writes code or contributes are the spirit of GPL. And when you hurt one of us, you hurt us all.

    Go ahead and fork plugins, it’s what makes WordPress, and any GPL product great. But when you fork, do it for the right reasons, and remember that the developer you’re forking from is a person too.

    Treat them how you’d like to be treated.

  • GPL – Oh Dear God

    GPL – Oh Dear God

    I come to code from a strange direction. I was a fangirl and I learned all about webpages because of that. Perhaps it’s because of that humble begining that I look at the GPL arguments much as I look at ‘shipping’ arguments in fandom. Shipping is when fans believe a relationship to exist between two characters, regardless of anything being scripted. A great example of this is Xena: Warrior Princess. Some people thought Xena and Gabrielle were a couple. Some people didn’t. When the two argued, there were fireworks. Now, with shipping, sometimes a miracle occurs and the couple do get together (see Mulder/Scully in The X-Files and Grissom/Sara in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation), but most of the time the arguments go on for eternity.

    That’s pretty much how GPL arguments make me feel. Ad nasuem. I hate them, and I was sorely tempted to post this with comments turned off. But various people asked me my opinion and that they’d like to see this posted, so… you’re masochists. This all started with Rarst asking me what I thought about a GPLv2 vs GPLv3 in a trac ticket in WordPress to fix plugins about page license requirement. I should note that he and I don’t see eye to eye about GPL, and we’re still pretty friendly.

    Here’s the thing. I don’t have a horse in this race. GPLv2, GPLv3, MIT, Apache, whatever. I don’t have a license I love beyond measure. You see, I work for The Man, and having done so for 13 years, I have an acceptance of things I can’t change. One of those things is ‘This is how we do things.’ You accept that, even if things aren’t the most efficient, or even if they’re not the way you’d do them if you could choose, this is what they are.

    I view the GPL issue in WordPress with the same antipathy. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I accept the rules for what they are and I have no reason to rock the boat. WordPress says ‘If you want to be in our repositories, and you want to be supporting our official stuff, you have to play by our rules.’ This is good business sense, it’s good branding, and it’s self-protection. With that in mind, I recently changed a plugin of mine to use code that was MIT licensed.

    Expat License (#Expat)

    This is a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL. It is sometimes ambiguously referred to as the MIT License. (MIT License compatibility with GPLv2)

    That’s easy enough. But I’m sure you’ve heard people argue that GPLv3 and GPLv2 are incompatible, or Apache is, and those are true statements. Because they’re incompatible, however, does not mean you can’t use them together, it means you can’t incorporate them!

    Let me explain. No. Let’s let Richard Stallman explain:

    When we say that GPLv2 and GPLv3 are incompatible, it means there is no legal way to combine code under GPLv2 with code under GPLv3 in a single program. This is because both GPLv2 and GPLv3 are copyleft licenses: each of them says, “If you include code under this license in a larger program, the larger program must be under this license too.” There is no way to make them compatible. We could add a GPLv2-compatibility clause to GPLv3, but it wouldn’t do the job, because GPLv2 would need a similar clause.

    Fortunately, license incompatibility only matters when you want to link, merge or combine code from two different programs into a single program. There is no problem in having GPLv3-covered and GPLv2-covered programs side by side in an operating system. For instance, the TeX license and the Apache license are incompatible with GPLv2, but that doesn’t stop us from running TeX and Apache in the same system with Linux, Bash and GCC. This is because they are all separate programs. Likewise, if Bash and GCC move to GPLv3, while Linux remains under GPLv2, there is no conflict.

    What does that mean? It means I could write a plugin in GPLv3 and use it with the GPLv2 (or later) WordPress and not have any issues. However what I cannot do is take that code, put it into WordPress, and distribute it as a new version of WP Core. And that’s (most of) why we shouldn’t have the GPLv3 plugins in the WordPress repository. The fact is that often new core features get their start as plugins, and if we allow GPLv3 in there, we run the risk of breaking licensing.

    Worse, if we get our ideas from a GPLv3 plugin and rewrite it to GPLv2, we still are at risk for violation. This is the same reason, to bring it back to fandom, why authors can’t read fanfiction. If they use your ideas, you can sue them. We have enough headaches with Hello Dolly, let’s not add to them. And before someone thinks I’m overreacting about that, I wish I was. I’ve watched copyright wars before, seen friends lose their websites over it, and I can’t imagine that a TV show would be less agressive than a software company when they feel their rights have been infringed. It’s terrible, but it’s the reality of the litigious society in which we live.

    So why don’t we just move WordPress to GPLv3?

    If it helps to think of software in a different way, pretend you have two versions of server software, Server 2.0 and Server 3.0. You can use the files from Server 2.0 on the box with Server 3.0, but you can’t use Server 2.0 files on Server 3.0. They’re not backwards compatible. That’s the first problem with GPLv3, we’d have to make sure every single bit of code in WordPress is able to be moved to GPLv3.

    This is clarified in the GPLv3 FAQ: (GPLv3 FAQ Update – Converting GPLv2 to GPLv3)

    I have a copy of a program that is currently licensed as “GPLv2, or (at your option) any later version.” Can I combine this work with code released under a license that’s only compatible with GPLv3, such as ASL 2.0?
    Once GPLv3 has been released, you may do this. When multiple licenses are available to you like this, you can choose which one you use. In this case, you would choose GPLv3.

    If you do this, you may also want to update the license notices. You have a number of options:

    • You may leave them as they are, so the work is still licensed under “GPLv2, or (at your option) any later version.” If you do, people who receive the work from you may remove the combination with parts that are only compatible with GPLv3, and use the resulting work under GPLv2 again.

      If you do this, we suggest you include copies of both versions of the GPL. Then, in a file like COPYING, explain that the software is available under “GPLv2, or (at your option) any later version,” and provide references to both the included versions. If you have any additional restrictions, per section 7 of GPLv3, you should list those there as well.

    • You may update them to say “GPLv3, or (at your option) any later version.” At this point, any versions of the work based on yours can only be licensed under GPLv3 or later versions. Include a copy of GPLv3 with the software.
    • You may also update them to say “GPLv3” only, with no upgrade option, but we recommend against this. Include a copy of GPLv3 with the software.

    That doesn’t sound terrible, does it? You can go from GPLv3 to GPLv2, so long as you remove all the GPLv3-and-up code. Backwards compatibility is complicated, and forward isn’t much better. The second problem is the bigger one. From the GPLv3 FAQ: (GPLv3 FAQ Update – permission to change release)

    Consider this situation: 1. X releases V1 of a project under the GPL. 2. Y contributes to the development of V2 with changes and new code based on V1. 3. X wants to convert V2 to a non-GPL license. Does X need Y’s permission?
    Yes. Y was required to release its version under the GNU GPL, as a consequence of basing it on X’s version V1. nothing required Y to agree to any other license for its code. Therefore, X must get Y’s permission before releasing that code under another license.

    And why would WordPress want to switch to GPLv3 anyway? Other than having more licenses compatible with GPLv3 than GPLv2, the other main differences didn’t strike me as anything WordPress needs. You can read ifrOSS’s document and come up with your own opinion, of course. Basically in order to get WordPress moved to GPLv3, every single person who ever submitted code to WordPress has to be contacted and sign off on the change. Now, unless a clever lawyer type can argue that the act of submitted code to core reliquieshes your ‘ownership’ thereof, and the code becomes community

    code maintained and manged by WordPress, and as such WordPress does not need to gain consent from all contributors, then maybe  this can be done. But that’s a long, mess, legal conversation.

    Finally, the real question is who are we protecting here? Remember, GPL is not about the developer but the user. The extra ‘freedoms’ that come in GPLv3 don’t really strike me as being about the user, and that worries me a little. Patent protection, permitting code to be kept from the end user, and tivoization are all great things for a developer who puts out the code, but as the person who wants to adapt it later, that sure feels pretty restrictive to me.

    Will I use GPLv3 ever? Sure. But not in my WordPress code.

  • GPL Freedoms – Yep, Porn’s Good!

    Did you know you can use WordPress for a porn site?

    Did you know you can use Drupal to show autopsy pictures?

    The freedoms of GPL don’t just extend to the software itself, but to how you use it. See, most of the time when we talk about GPL freedom, we’re talking about how you’re free to take the code and turn it into a monkey if you want to. But lately, there’s been an effort to remind people that part of GPL also means we don’t restrict your usage either.

    WordPress has a link to ‘Freedoms’ at the footer of all admin pages, and that duplicates the Bill of Rights found at WordPress’s Philosophy:

    WordPress is licensed under the General Public License (GPLv2 or later) which provides four core freedoms, consider this as the WordPress “bill of rights”:

    • The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
    • The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
    • The freedom to redistribute.
    • The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.

    Drupal doesn’t spell it out as clearly, but given that they have fetchgals, which can pull in thumbnails of porno pics (if I read that right), I feel confident to say that Drupal doesn’t care what you use Drupal for. Joolma! puts a lot of stock in people using their product for their communities and nowhere did I find note of a limitation of what you cannot do.

    The point is valid, however. You can use WordPress, Drupal, Joomla! and pretty much any GPL software for whatever purpose you want, moral or immoral, legal or illegal. This is interesting when you compare it to most EULAs, like Microsoft Office:

    7. SCOPE OF LICENSE. The software is licensed, not sold. This agreement only gives you some rights to use the features included in the software edition you licensed. Microsoft reserve reserves all other rights. Unless applicable law gives you more rights despite this limitation, you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so, you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways. You may not
    […]
    • use the software in any way that is against the law;

    GPL doesn’t tell you that you can’t use it in a way that’s illegal, and perhaps Microsoft only does to escape a potential lawsuit for someone saying “Aha! You used Office to draft your Mainifesto!” We live in over litigious times. Open Source, by telling us ‘Do what you want, it’s not our beef.’ removes themselves from those issues cleanly and without ass hattery.

    One of the tenets of American Law is our freedom to speak our mind. Part of being an American Citizen is that you have the right to defend your beliefs, no matter how much I oppose them, and so long as no one breaks the law, that’s fine. I can ask you to leave my house if you do it on my private property, and you can ask me to leave yours. But if we meet on the street I cannot have you arrested for that. I will defend your freedoms just as you must defend mine, regardless of any agreement or lack there of.

    This applies to Open Source because I have the right to use WordPress, Drupal or Joomla! in ways you may find distasteful. As long as I’m not violating the agreement of my ISP, the laws of where my server is located, and the laws of my nation, I’m allowed to call you names, insult your heritage, and show nudie pics of pretty girls. On the other hand, I cannot publish your personal information (it’s a violation of invasion of privacy) and I cannot post naked pictures of you without your consent. Actually, my webhost won’t permit and naked pictures at all, so there’s that.

    So when you see a site run by WordPress, Drupal or Joomla! that’s doing something you hate, there’s very little you can do about it. Report it to their webhost if you think it’s breaking the law, but otherwise celebrate people in their freedom.

  • PMC Sues THR Over Open Source Code

    Bet you never thought you’d hear that one!

    Today Deadline’s Parent Company Sues The Hollywood Reporter’s Parent Company For Copyright Infringement. They posted a link to the complaint and its exhibits. And this is where I sat up and blinked.

    See, TVLine uses WordPress. And part of their claim is that their (I assume) home-grown plugin was lifted. Specifically this file: http://www.tvline.com/wp-content/plugins/todaysnews/js/jquery.featuredarticle.js

    Now, I’ll totally allow that the site stole the code. But it’s WordPress which means the code is GPL which means … they can. They’re dicks about it, mind you, but they totally can. I’m interested to see how this one plays out.

    ETA: By ‘the code’ I mean not JUST that .js file, but the HTML, the specific WordPress calls, etc. THR actually isn’t using WordPress, as it happens.

  • The Morality of Forking

    The Morality of Forking

    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)

    Two ForksWe 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.

    Melted ForkWas 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.

    Twisted ForksSince 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.

  • The Legality of Forking

    The Legality of Forking

    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.