AliCommerce is a Pirated Version of BV Commerce
My name is Marcus McConnell. I am the president, founder and lead
developer of BV Software, a company I started in 2001 in Richmond,
Virginia. BV Commerce is our main application. It’s an asp.net
ecommerce software product that has gone through 5 releases in the 8
years that I have put into this company. We were the first commercial asp.net
ecommerce solution ever released. We have several thousand stores
running on BV Commerce, and this has been my life’s work for the last
eight years. We are a small company competing with much bigger
companies that just tries to create good software for web merchants
and developers. We are also an established company that has numerous
well-known clients as has won several industry awards.
For years I’d thought about building a DotNetNuke e-commerce module,
but just didn’t have the time. When you are a small business owner,
you have to wear a lot of hats. Yesterday I finally decided to
investigate what it would take to build such a module and in the
process I downloaded AliCommerce to see what my ‘competitor’ had
created.
As I looked through the software I realized with horror that
AliCommerce was actually BV Commerce. Since I am the chief architect
and wrote the majority of the code myself, it was easy to see that
AliCommerce was a blatant theft of our code. The man selling this
software, Frank Wang, actually purchased BV Commerce several months
before each new ‘release’ of AliCommerce and then stripped our
branding and resold it.
This is not a developer dispute. We have no affiliation or association
with Frank Wang or AliCommerce whatsoever. What he did was totally
illegal. He did not have permission to rebrand our software and sell
it as his own. I have attached the receipts as well as the unmitigated
proof in photos of how AliCommerce is a direct theft of BvCommerce.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about this or
require any further proof.
Pirated software is a fact of life on the internet, but I am shocked
and disheartened to realize that this theft has been going on for over
two years now. Countless merchants are now running illegal copies of
my software, and those merchants, as well as the DotNetNuke community
should be as angry as I am that we have been stolen from and lied to.
I might never have noticed this theft at all if I hadn’t decided to
build a DotNetNuke ecommerce module myself.
I am currently trying to resolve this situation. As the AliCommerce
website is listed in Australia and China it seems highly unlikely that
I will ever receive any recompense for this theft, but I need to make
AliCommerce customers know that they are running illegal software and
that what they are using is bastardized software that does not
accurately reflect what BV Commerce has to offer.
This is a more than unfortunate situation, it has damaged myself, my company, and countless DNN community members but I want to try and find
some way to make lemonade out of lemons. I hope that the DotNetNuke
team will help us get the word out to their users who have been lied
to and stolen from so that we can look forward to an ecommerce solution for DNN that users can trust.
If you are an AliCommerce customer, please look at the attached proof
that you are running illegal software, and please fill out the contact form below so that we can keep you updated about the situation.
If you register with us, we will not prosecute you. You are victims as much as we are. But we
need your help to resolve this issue and try to minimize the damages
that have already been done. Please help us go forward and create an
official legal version of BvCommerce for DotNetNuke that we can all be
proud of.
Marcus McConnell
Founder and President, BV Software