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“Giving back” is a term that gets thrown around a bit, but we’ve benefitted from open source software, company sponsorships, and the generosity of others, and we believe in paying that forward via our own contributions to open source software and sponsorships.
All of our WordPress plugins are 100% GPL licensed, and we also have an extensive collection of free, open source code. For example, our WooCommerce plugin framework is completely open sourced and available for developer use.
We also try to support learning or other causes via sponsorships when we can. We’ve sponsored WordCamps, WordPress workshops, and WooConf in the past, and will continue to sponsor events (both WordPress-related and other events) where we think we can make an impact.
FOSS
Our WordPress plugins are all 100% GPL licensed — we’ve learned a lot by checking out code from other developers, and we keep our code GPL as well to repay the favor. As our work in the WooCommerce division derives from WordPress, our code properly inherits its license.
Our wc-plugins repo is private as we follow WooThemes’s convention for plugins we sell in their marketplace, but this code is still GPL.
Where we can, we’ve open sourced other code, such as our plugin framework, WooCommerce dev helper, and several free WooCommerce plugins (along with tons of code snippets, gists, and code tutorials on our blog).
We also contribute massively to WooCommerce, and encourage our team to contribute to WooCommerce, WordPress core, or other open source projects (for example, contributing to libraries our plugins use).
While none of our Rails code is open sourced at the moment, we’re happy to contribute to open source tools and apps here as well. If we don’t contribute code, we’re also happy to donate to open source projects, and have made monetary contributions in the past to Feedjira, icon fonts / libraries we’ve used, the social login OAuth library we previously used, and other code sources we’ve used in projects or as a reference.
Sponsorships
We’re happy to sponsor conferences, camps, or workshops related to the work we do with WordPress, Shopify, or eCommerce in general. Here are some sponsorships we’ve done in the past:
- WooConf
- We sponsored the first WooCommerce conference in 2014, and in 2016 were a general sponsor and help desk sponsor.
- WordCamps
- We had a fun time sponsoring WordCamp Portland 2015 as the “official donut sponsor” — seriously, Blue Star Donuts for all attendees. We’ve also sponsored WC Toronto and WC Peoria.
- A Day of REST
- We did a micro sponsorship and free ticket giveaway for the first ever WordPress REST API conference, and did a small sponsorship for the 2016 Day of REST.
- Ruby DCamp
- We were also a small sponsor for Ruby DCamp in South Africa, which Hannes helps organize.
- WordPress Workshops
- BobWP frequently runs WordPress workshops on a variety of topics, from getting started with blogging to launching your first store. We’ve co-sponsored two workshops on getting started with WooCommerce and building your own membership site, along with some other “scholarships” and events he’s run.
Attending a workshop or conference related to our software stack or eCommerce and think a sponsorship on our part would be a good fit? Get in touch with Catherine and we’ll see if we can make it work!