@Barry - If a developer's certainty as to the commercial viability of a project on the WordPress platform is so tenuous, he should really be considering a different platform. I mean, if you design a WordPress plugin to do a certain thing, to address a particular market, you are getting to use a platform with hundreds of man-years invested into it for free, at zero cost to you or your intended customers. It seems a tad petty, then, to complain that your commercial plugins cannot be listed on the site that organizes, encourages and allows that free platform to exist.

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.