[harry-wood]

Yes. I didn't do much with wordpress for years, but always thought of it as a very open-source-ish community. Recently I find myself taking on a pre-existing wordpress site with a lot of plugins. I was quite surprised by the way so many plugins are available for $$$. It's sort of impressive "professionalisation" of the ecosystem. I can see it's allowing/encouraging glossy presentation, explanatory videos, documentation, and support guarantes, but there's a voice in my head thinking "Nah! These PHP snippets are all supposed to be free aren't they?"

[skilled]

Yep. I used to spend a lot of time working with WordPress sites, maybe 5 or so years ago. I don't have any factual data for this, but I suspect that some of the plugin creators pivoted to a "greedy by design" strategy.

If you have had 1,000s of bloggers write about your free product, advertising it on your behalf for years. Why not take that success and squeeze the living soul out of it?

I mean, it's not like people are going to go back to their reviews or old blog posts to correct something. All the "juice" is still being passed to you, and search engines like Google are none the wiser.