It’s so funny to read back about the past drama with the WooCommerce forking. I commented a few times in the linked WPCandy piece, being one of the few defenders of the fork (which was completely ethical and allowed under the license and the decision of the employees who made the decision to take new jobs), and I completely agree with everything I wrote then (which isn’t always the case after ten years).

When you look at the massive success of WooCommerce and its place not just in the WordPress ecosystem but in e-commerce platforms, it is clear that forking and hiring Mike and Jay was the right move. And as Mike said in his interview, it definitely feels “inevitable.”

Jigoshop didn’t see the plugin as a real focus area by Mike’s own admission, and Woo did. And that makes so much of the difference.

It’s hard to think of another plugin that has had the impact or success of WooCommerce. Honestly, $20m for WooThemes was a tremendous exit, but six years later, looking at the valuation of Shopify and others, a hosted WooCommerce—as-a-Service offering could be worth much more. I think we’re all lucky it is part of the Automattic umbrella.

As I said way back then, it is totally reasonable for the Jigoshop team to have felt burned and to be upset by what transpired, but this is how the real world works. I think back to those days when so many people in the so-called “community” (including a person who later went on to scam the community himself) were so critical of such an essential part of open source software, and I wonder if their position has changed. And if it hasn’t, I guess I still wonder why they bother with OSS stuff to begin with.

In any event, happy anniversary to WooCommerce.