WooThemes recently announced the launch of their free WordPress e-commerce plugin, WooCommerce, along with a few themes with built-in integration.

This is one of our biggest release to date and it’s absolutely free. WooCommerce is an all-new plugin application and library of integrated themes for WordPress that help individuals and businesses turn their sites into professional, e-commerce stores. Our aim for WooCommerce is to be an e-commerce toolkit that allows anyone to sell anything online. View the WooCommerce page to see all the powerful features packed into the plugin.

WooCommerce is a fork of the lesser-known Jigoshop plugin, with a bunch of nice additions. This has been the cause of some controversy about the “ethics” behind the decision, despite it being 100% legal under the GPL. Personally, I can see merits to both sides of the argument, but I think it should encourage competition. The Jigoshop team should be able to absorb some of the improvements WooThemes made to their fork back into Jigoshop as well.