Yet another theft and a blow to the nopCommerce community!

We at Nop-Templates.com have encountered several thefts of our products. And most of them we kept a secret from the community in order not to harm the eco-system. But if you remember from a previous post:

https://www.nopcommerce.com/boards/t/35881/a-new-attempt-to-copy-the-nop-ajax-filters.aspx


We decided to make any such new attempts public. So here we are again with a blatant theft from one of the nopCommerce vendors.

Please read on in order to know who you are dealing with it when you buy nopCommerce products from this vendor or use their services.

This is their product:

https://www.nopcommerce.com/p/1996/nopcommerce-responsive-nop-fashion-theme-3-plugins-included-deal-of-the-day-plugin.aspx

http://www.tech2globe.com/detailsPages/themesDetails?params=MTk=

And this is their demo website of the theme:

http://www.zupple.com/men-fashion/shaving

If you view source of the page and open one of the .css files:

http://www.zupple.com/men-fashion/Plugins/Tech2Globe.AjaxFilter/Scripts/AjaxFilters.css

You will see this text:

/*
* Copyright 2015 Seven Spikes Ltd. All rights reserved. (http://www.nop-templates.com)
* http://www.nop-templates.com/t/licensinginfo
*/

.nopAjaxFilters7Spikes .filtersTitlePanel {
  display: none;
}
.nopAjaxFilters7Spikes a {
    cursor: pointer;
}
.product-filters {
  display: none; /*hide empty default filters*/
}

...

So again someone who copied but did not even bother to remove our copyright from the file!
You guys at tech2globe are really amazing!

You even have our product image of the Ajax Filters on your website:

http://www.tech2globe.com/extensions-themes

Again do not bother to remove it, we have screenshotted it.

Please note that we have downloaded all your code and have all the evidence in hard-copy. So do not bother to delete the plugin from your theme. We will make the evidence available from our website soon.

Also we will make this public on all our social channels and to all the nopCommerce channels.

I am sorry that such a great system as nopCommerce has to deal with such ugly acts, a vendor stealing from another vendor!

And here it is, the hard evidence:

http://nop-templates.com/help/fraud_filters.zip

Hello Nop-templates Team,

This thing just brought to our attention today only that our Ajax filter has some css and code were referred from your plugin. I was asked to check this by Nopcommerce team. I was shocked to see this when I got to know this and i started investigating this issue right away. This is 1.00 AM in India and I am replying your post as I just got to know that this was a mistake of one of our new Developer. He did this without notifying us and We were not even aware of this. In fact we have been working on Nopcommerce for last 4-5 years and customised many applications.
We believe in fair competition and we know if we have survive in the market for long term, we have to go fairly.

We have 80 odd employees and it is quite difficult to catch these things sometime although I completely agree that it is responsibility of company to watch the compliance issues.

As I was told by nopcommerce team to not remove this until you check and you complete your investigation, we didn't remove any thing.

You could check our other plugins (mention below) and you would see we have developed everything by our own. we have a team of developers and if we have any intention to steal anything, we just need one person and copy and launch everything.


1. Deal of the Day.
2. Mega Menu
3. Zoom
4. Precious Metal price change plugin.

You won't seeing anything copied or anything like that.

At the end, I really apologise what happened and I assure you this won't repeat. We also do not wish to impact the reputation of Nopcommerce community as we also a part of it and wish to work on the platform for long term.

We believe in long term benefits not short term so we have no intention of doing any thefts or anything.

Hope you understand the matter.

Thanks,
Tech2Globe Team

Hello nop-template team,

This is rinkoo sharma software developer in tech2globe team. Basically i m new employee of tech2globe team. I was told to finish this task on priority basis and I took reference from your filter to complete this fast and planned to update it later. I made this plugin by referring some css,js and code without informing my company. its all my mistake and has done by me and I apologies for the same.

I take entire responsibility of this thing and if you check other plugins and products of our company, you will not see anything near to this issue. My boss has asked me to check today when he got some news from Nopcommerce team.


Thanks
Rinkoo Sharma
software Developer
Tech2globe team

Hi,

This is not the first case of such inappropriate behavior within our community. And in all such cases our partners who used source-code of other vendor told us that it was a junior developer, it was mistake and so on. And this time we decided to demonstrate that it's not acceptable within nopCommerce community. A company should remember that it's  always responsible for its employees.

1. The theme (that included this plugin) was deleted from our extensions and themes directory
2. We cancelled our solution partnership with Tech2Globe

The same will be done for any other theme or plugin vendor who will try to steal source code of other partners

The extensions submitted to the extension section will be reviewed more carefully now. If a vendor does this again, then all of its products will be removed from the "extensions and themes" directory. This way vendors will respect the extensions section.

Bravo

I absolute agree on the reaction. It is totally unethical behavior in business (without even considering the legal point) to steal the works of others.
It is really a shame to see this happening between nop partners.
Moreover the 7 spikes plugin are just doing the work, they are pretty cheap and I don't understand the need to reinvent the wheel.
Moreover, one thing is to reverse engineer the knowhow another is totally steal the code. The fact that a junior developer did this is not an excuse. You run your own business and you are responsible of your people.
If (IF) you got some programmers able to work with nop simply get some idea and develop some NEW plugin to give your own contribution to the whole nop community.
My 2 cents.

We have been contributing in nop community by developing our own plugins and themes. We didn't start or we were not running the company by stealing anyone else's work. Do you think if we were aware of this fact that developer copied the code, we kept on continue selling the product. How much we could earn with one plugin?

If we are running the company, do you think we would copy the code of the biggest giant in NOP and sell at same place? we have developed 7-8 more plugins with same amount of themes. It is easy to say when you are on other end but anyone can get into the same boat because of their employee's mistake. Few things happen in companies which you get to know once someone else catches that.

At the end of the day, developer didn't lose his salary but us who lost the partnership which was running for long time. Everyone deserve a second chance but we didn't get that.

I hope this makes everyone clear that no company wants to destroy their reputation because of one small thing.This is small world and you can't get away with anything.

Thank you!!

It's called code review.

Every single vendor who stole our code made the same statement:

"It was the developer!".

And we believe every one of them is lying. So it is not a matter of code review really.

Just to put the Tech2Globe words into perspective a little bit. They said it was the developer and he only copied the .css. But look at this:

http://www.nop-templates.com/help/decompiledEvidence.PNG

Our own assembly with our own obfuscation! You just renamed the file. How is this "just the css"!?

Also is your developer who copied the plugin responsible for your website:

http://www.tech2globe.com/extensions-themes

What is our product with our own product image!!! doing on your website?

I am really looking forward to your comments on this!