WooCommerce Marks 10 Year Anniversary of Forking Jigoshop
WooCommerce is celebrating 10 years since WooThemes launched the first iteration of the WooCommerce plugin. Paul Maiorana, WooCommerce’s current CEO, covered a few high highlights of the plugin’s rising popularity over the years in his anniversary post. After 16 months in the wild, WooCommerce had been downloaded 500,000 times and passed the 1 million downloads milestone just 137 days later. In 2014, the night before the very first WooConf, the plugin celebrated passing 5 million downloads. It was acquired by Automattic in 2015 in a deal rumored to be more than $20 million. WooCommerce’s anniversary post, which glossed over its checkered origin story, reignited some of the controversy surrounding the Jigoshop fork. While the post mentions that WooThemes hired two Jigoshop developers “to create a dedicated eCommerce plugin called WooCommerce,” it neglected to mention that the initial version was actually a fork of Jigoshop. WooThemes had convinced Mike Jolley and Jay Koster to fork the work they had done for their previous employer, Jigowatt, after failing to make a deal with the Jigowatt team. In a post titled “Our forking views,” the remaining Jigoshop team shed some light on what transpired privately before WooThemes announced its fork: Woo’s bid to buy…
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