In reply to Otto.

Ok, if you were referring to spammers who submit low-quality or copied work, then I agree of course because that just sucks. But I think it should be said, that this doesn't apply to the many honest developers who are putting their stuff on .org as well.

I basically was referring to your tweet to Matt where you said "The theme directory is not an advertising means. That is not its purpose. If that is your intent, then you are doing it wrong.". That statement isn't accurate in my opinion and I wouldn't say that Matt is a spammer, just like many other developers and companies aren't spammers and still use .org to promote their company, products or services. There is nothing wrong with that, it's just a natural thing to do. I would even say that if you want to run a serious WP business and don't use the potential of .org to do some kind of promotion, that actually would be a bad business decision, from a marketing point of view. The same bad business decision as if you want to build a company and then don't invest in marketing to tell the world about your offering.

There are many developers out there who invest the majority of their time and hard work to create awesome products and supporting their users. These honest people shouldn't be put in the same boat with annoying spammers, who won't be successfull on the long run anyway because they usually are not even capable of maintaining their stuff properly and supporting users.

As mentioned, many small businesses wouldn't even exist if they wouldn't use .org for promotion because not everyone has the budget to build a business without the reach of .org. That's why I mentioned saying that .org isn't an advertising platform for WP businesses is actually wrong and doesn't reflect the reality. It's just a natural thing to do and a valid and smart business decision. If you look at the successfull products on .org, most of them have a commercial background - either there is a pro version or the product is being used to promote a company or send traffic to a particular website (e.g. with paid WP tutorials or else). The reason is simple, people usually don't work for free and we all have to support our families and make a living. Nobody can actually build a successful product which in the end takes a lot of resources to maintain and support and then don't make money with it, in reality that doesn't work out, unless you have your pockets full of money and don't have anything else to do.

For some reason in the WP community you often read "If you're using .org to build your business, then you're doing it wrong". In my opinion that is a bad understanding of marketing and business, because in the end .org is a great tool for building and market a business and I'm not talking about spam. I'm talking about valuable products that people love to use and in the end it's a win-win for everyone. Yes, we all get that WordPress is open-source and so on, but that doesn't mean if you think of WordPress as a business is a bad thing.