@Angsuman Chakraborty - There is no need for Wordpress to cooperate with commercial WP Developers. The developer would be the one who benefits through it, not wordpress or the wordpress community. They have their own developers who not only develop wordpress but also some of the plugins, which are considered "third party", cause they are released by the persons and not through automattic.

If they had money issues they would cut the wordpress.com-stats plugin for .org users which runs on wordpress.com and would remove pingomatic as a default service (or strip pingomatic itself down to a lesser server load). that would cut some major costs.

Automattic doesn´t keep you from developing for wordpress. It´s very accessable for any developer. They just don´t want to host stuff of you if you´re an commercial developer and have link to your commercial site in the foorer. That´s perfectly ok with me, because even if the plugin on their site is free, it´s advertising. Just because its not on the wordpress site doesnt mean you can´t get word about your plugins out there.

@jeremyclarke - That´s true, sometimes they forget to listen *coughtinymcecough*