I think it would be a tragedy if the criteria for being able to post a question or start a discussion on the Wordpress Support Forum -- was whether you paid for your theme or not.

The fact that Wordpress was created and continues to be developed by a very passionate and active community is one of the strongest reasons for using it. The 'support' that everyone refers to in the Wordpress Support Forum is just conversation, speech, and it is a central part of the very same community that makes Wordpress great.

Building a business around open source software is very difficult from a developers point of view, and equally so from a end-user's point of view. While I'm somewhat new to building my business around the Wordpress community (as an end-user), my day-job is entirely built upon and dependent on GPL licensed open source software - and it is important to me to see both paid and private, as well as free and public opportunities for development, support, and discussion. Specifically I'm talking about: Linux, Ubuntu, R, MySQL, InfiniDB, ... If I knew that I couldn't discuss software or code that I had paid for from one of the commercial offerings in these spaces, in one of the main channels for such discussion, I would have been very reluctant to engage that community in the first place. My use of these technologies is as an end-user; my evaluation process would perhaps be different if I was a developer.

I agree with hakre that creating a community where you report and warn against developers who don't provide support is very dangerous to the Wordpress community.

It seems to me that it would be counterintuitive and counter productive for Wordpress.org to release code under GPL, which assures that it can be freely distributed, and then restrict the venues in which you can discuss that code and its derivative works.

GS