When Pawan first released a plugin with his unluck code, I wrote a post celebrating his ingenuity & for good reason.

At that time the majority of plugin authors were supporting thier work with paid links, even WP Core developers. It was a breath of fresh air and a real alternative.

A small price to pay for access to some plugins with solid useful functionality.

I still stand by that post and I can't see how that violates the GPL

At the time most WP "pro" themes weren't GPL

Is the plugin directory soon going to remove all WP plugins that force an RSS subscription within the dashboard, or themes that do the same.
Many don't even have a way to switch the widget off other than modifying the code, which defeats the purpose of using plugins from the repository & using the update functionality.