How is it any different than a Flickr or Vimeo plugin? You can’t use those without an account, and they have free and paid accounts, just like Akismet…

As I see it, WordPress plugin authors who are worried about making money should spend less time agitating for access to the plugin repository

Agree entirely. I’ve not put a plugin in the repository, or updated any that are already there for a while. Have no intention of putting any plugins in there at any point in the future. To be honest, thinking about it, I haven’t actually downloaded a plugin from there for, well close on a year now.

If you had capitalized upon that spotlight by releasing any sort of plugin within, say, a year, I have no doubt that you would be making a good living from it now, instead of being written off as vapourware.

Strange that nobody has noticed that when someone reminds me of that link, I tend to go and work on some other projects for a bit before coming back and scrapping what I had and starting from scratch. :)

If I were a plugin developer I’d be pretty pissed that theme developers were getting special treatment, but then given the shoddy way theme developers have been treated in the past it’s swings and roundabouts, really.

What people should respect is that the WordPress team are protecting a rare and fragile thing: an environment in which people are motivated to freely give of their time for the benefit of themselves and others. Motivation is tricky and nothing would muddy the waters more than to include commercial plugins.

I understand that commercial plugin authors are anxious to make money but this reluctance to understand where their free WordPress meal is coming from is short-sighted. Again, think about all you are getting from this situation.

It is also unfair to say that Matt himself is anti-business, he actively encourages it – in May 2008, he gave your StayPress project a tacit endorsement and massive exposure by linking to your Introducing StayPress post. If you had capitalized upon that spotlight by releasing any sort of plugin within, say, a year, I have no doubt that you would be making a good living from it now, instead of being written off as vapourware.

Property owners would be finding StayPress and buying your plugin or service, not because they’ve ever heard of WordPress or have the slightest idea of what a plugin repository might be, but because they searched for a way to handle bookings. As far as they would be concerned, the lovely WordPress dashboard they use everyday to manage their bookings would simply be part of StayPress.

The developer of Jomres, on the Joomla platform, is doing a LOT of business, charging up to £330 for his plugin, and is now actively adapting it for the WordPress platform, because he recognizes that it will be easier for his users – his users have no idea what Joomla or WordPress are, all they know is that Jomres allows them to manage their bookings. That could have been StayPress.

As I see it, WordPress plugin authors who are worried about making money should spend less time agitating for access to the plugin repository and more time actually writing plugins, you will make plenty of money if you simply focus on getting them shipped.

If I remember correctly, almost everyone uses it, fully-featured, for free but if you have a massive site and subject the service to unusually high usage, you pay a few dollars, but far less than it would cost you to police your own comments.

Again, Akismet is one of the things that has allowed WordPress to bloom, to everyone’s advantage, and now people are complaining about it?

Everyone should take a long, hard look at the pay-for-play mess that other CMS eco-systems have descended into because of the dominance of commercial plugins.

Now it would be easy enough to not have Akismet show up on the website, but but have it update through the control panel. That would be a simple issue.

I just don’t like double standards.