In reply to Steven Gliebe.

I wonder if developers are concerned that making a free functionality plugin would be helping their competitors too much.

- You help your competitor save time
- You make it easier for your users to switch to your competitor

I think that's short-sided thinking. Not only is the developer saving time for himself, but he's also making it easier for his competitor's customers switch to him. And, as you say: he's also facilitating a larger overall userbase, by driving the underlying data scheme toward a standard.

Besides: in a GPL environment, it's not like a competitor can't already see the developer's code, and write a conversion/import script anyway. You're never going to lock in customers by using a proprietary data scheme.