In reply to Carlos.

Just to clarify, we included Freemius SDK as a licensing system to offer users premium features and support. It is fully compliant with wordpress.org and does not violate any rules, it passes the theme check as well. Users must give their consent to allow data collection and it's within wordpress.org guidelines.

You can read it on their FAQ: Our WordPress SDK is compliant with the WordPress.org guidelines and has been reviewed and approved, by the plugins and themes review teams. In fact, there are currently hundreds of products that are hosted on WordPress.org and are using Freemius.

As for Merlin, we removed it from the free version (1.1.1). It's a setup wizard that helps with importing demo content, it uses native WordPress importer and plugin installer code. Both Merlin and Freemius packages are GPL licensed and fully compliant with wordpress.org guidelines.