You misunderstood me

Until October 2007, the WordPress community, even core developers were living off paid links. With plugin developers it wasn't necessarily paid link within the plugins (there was one I know of) but paid links on their websites.

Pawan introduced his locking method in February 2008, and I first saw it implemented in a plugin for Blogrush Feb 22nd which added a custom feed you could control for syndication.

Pawan's implementation might not be perfect, I think a lot of problems could have been solved by making it extremely clear in the description before installation that an email sub/registration was required, but if you take it a couple of stages further it would allow even paid plugins and themes to be GPL and stored/scrutinized by the WordPress community on WP.org

It is a far better solution than calls to private update servers which may or may not be secure (remember that WP build that got hacked) and a far better end user experience.

Pawan didn't break any previously published written rule, and from what I can see from all the calls to ban him, there were quite a few people defending him.

Pawan was a whole year ahead of paid themes going GPL