In reply to Miroslav Glavić.

I would NEVER support adding ads on the plugins. I am sorry. But no.

Hi Miroslav,

To be fair to Edith Allison, I don't think anything they wrote mentioned adding ads on the plugins.

Having a plugin marketplace is orthogonal to ads, albeit one often sadly begets the other. But even then, ads wouldn't need to appear in inappropriate places.

There is enough abuse of my admin dashboard with “rate my plugin” “subscribe to my newsletter” and so forth.

I could be wrong, but I do not think you would get any argument from anyone who wanting to run a legitimate business where they strive to meet the needs of their customers and/or users. I certainly would not want that.

But having a marketplace where both free and paid options are in-fact options mean that more people could participate in providing well-supported plugins vs. much of the abandonware that the current plugin repository houses.

I think the model of paying for support instead of the plugin itself is better...

Forcing all plugin developers to use only one (1) monetization model means you end up with only plugins that are developed by companies that are good at executing that model, but not plugins that leverage different core competencies.

Some people are good at writing software and support their software on a one-on-one basis, but not good at recruiting, hiring and managing a staff of enough people to support a support business.

Also, one of the goals of a developer IMO is to write such great plugins that support needs are minimized. But if they way they make money is through support then they are going to look for insidious ways to make you need support. And IMO that's a really bad incentive to promote.

Forcing only paid support as a model is basically like a planned economy rather than a free market, where a free market is much better a producing innovation than a planned economy and I'd rather have the innovation (but let's not stretch this analogy too far lest we start debating things unrelated to WordPress.)

...is better than plugin authors abusing my admin dashboard with the pro version of the plugin or their other plugins.

That turns out to be a false binary. There is no reason authors of plugin are destined to abuse your admin dashboard if a marketplace existed. Again I think most (all?) of us agree that such abuse is a bad thing.

Instead, if there were accepted ways in which plugin authors were allowed to promote their plugins in a marketplace there would be far fewer plugin authors who would feel the need to resort to bugging you constantly in your admin dashboard. And especially if WordPress.org cracked down on the practice.

Take a look at Apple's iPhone/iPad and the AppStore. When I go to the AppStore I see lots of ads. But when I use my iPhone or iPad I do not see any ads. And that is how it really should be in WordPress. But in WordPress there is no store to run the ads so authors end up putting ads where they should not be.

I think you would ironically be happier if there were an official WordPress PluginStore because then you'd only need to see ads when you visited their store.

#fwiw