. . . and the debate rages on. Thank God for 25-year olds. They make stuff for fun and then wind up billionaires by accident. There is nothing wrong with that either. If someone wants to make a living with plugins for open source software, make something no one else would duplicate and enough people need bad enough to pay for.

As WP evolves more as a CMS, blogging plugins will give way to fully featured apps like NextGen or others for which payment might be warranted. I bought Gravity Forms and love it. But, I want to eventually make money with my site.

I like the pay for support model or clubs for dev who make a living writing code. For the hobbyist, being nickeled and dimed to death makes me rather by an Adobe/Microsoft product and take a course. That doesn't sound open-sourcy enough for these parts.