“I believe the feature is an oversight and will be removed in the immediate future ensuring that only themes and plugins from the official directories are allowed to be used.“

It’s WordPress for Business not WordPress for Blogs. If Business customers don’t have the ability to upload and activate the plugins they want to use, be they commercial plugins they purchased outside the WordPress.org repository OR custom plugins they developed themselves or paid to have developed to accomplish what they want to do, it’s not a viable business solution.

Uploading themes and plugins and not forcing users to only use what is in the WordPress.org repository isn’t an oversight. It’s a necessary feature from a business standpoint.

Do you think self-hosted would remove the ability to upload your own themes and plugins? Then why would you think a Business class hosting solution for WordPress would do so?

It’s simple: WordPress.com wants to compete with the other WordPress hosting companies and to do so it needs to allow those business customers to upload themes and plugins. Otherwise they’d stand no chance at competing with the GoDaddy and Pagely’s of the WordPress world.

“But... But... But GPL... Someone might upload a non-GPL plugin to their own business web site ” OH THE HORROR!!! Most themes and plugins adhere to the GPL. Can we stop making this some sort of controversy or topic of discussion? It’s time to move on. Anyone that matters in WordPress is already GPL compliant. Quit worrying about bottom feeders.

Also... custom plugins developed for a site don’t have to be released as GPL because they don’t have to be released publicly to begin with. So you can say they inherit the GPL but it’s moot because they don’t have to be released and distributed at all if they were developed for use on a specific site.

This wasn’t an oversight. It’s a necessity for doing business focused WordPress hosting.