Disclaimer: Former Sales Director of Coding Futures (YM's parent company) here.

This just goes to show what a great guy Tim is and despite being constantly knocked back by influential sections of the WP community, he still did the right thing for the community.

Tim always wanted to give something back to the WP community, it was after all supplementing his income, but our status as commercial developers meant he was often faced with everything from mild disdain to outright hostility for us having the audacity to charge for plugins and not GPLing sections of the code. This left us unable to sponsor WordPress events* and were denied access to other normal WP facilities (such as the repo) for similar reasons. One the whole we were made to feel pretty much unwanted but thankfully many of our customers knew nothing of the community (or of WP in general), so we survived. We could have gone down the route of others and simply turned the plugin into a hosted service, but that would have been far worse for the customer and Tim tried to avoid that at all costs.

It also made it harder for us to shout about some of the awesome things we were doing. Back when the first Facebook plugins were coming out, we first got the entire YM payment system running in Facebook, then entire WordPress sites. We launched a whole YM powered Facebook video-on-demand system (including payments obviously) that people could buy for less than $100. Some genuinely fun and interesting stuff, but none of the WP news sites wanted to carry our press releases as it was obviously commercial (WP Tavern I believe did actually break ranks and covered the FB stuff I believe - Thanks guys :) ).

YM grew as featureful as it did (and even today, many of it's more awesome features haven't been replicated by it's competitors) because even as the bespoke development studio Tim ran grew, he was still happy to constantly divert development resources to YM, despite us finding a chap in Turkey (who later went on found his own membership plugin) selling YM (including the none-GPLed bits) for less that us, with the license key checking circumvented, then sending his customers to us for support. Tim being the nice guys he is actually honoured those licenses and rather than take the Turk to court, agreed to a retrospective licensing deal.

It wasn't all bad, there were some great people in the community and I cherish my time with CF and the people it introduced me to, but ultimately I came to the conclusion that it's simply not an arena where commercial developers can flourish, certainly not writing native plugins. People used to be amazed when they saw we had offices, full time staff and telephone support, but in truth, that could never have been supported by just the WordPress sales and it's a shame for WP as a whole that nobody really can, When Tim did actually decide to call it a day with YM, it came as no surprise that rather than selling it to somebody who had no interest in further development, the money was never the main driver for him when it came to YM.

I urge you all, if you're looking for a consultant on payment gateways, PCI Compliance (don't get me started on how many WP Plugin devs get that so so wrong), data mining, SEO or just want a great speaker at your conference, then get in contact with Tim via http://www.timnash.co.uk/ and give a little something back to nice guy Tim.

(* It seems after I left they did sponsor a WordCamp, but only under the parent company name, no mention at all of Your Members)