[jefflinwood]

I think the customer support at that Wordpress Plugin company was actually quite reasonable - if they use time limited S3 URLs (for presumably paid downloads), that's certainly their choice.

I must be completely misunderstanding something, but why wouldn't you buy the plugin, and then distribute it using your private server (like they suggest)? If the company goes out of business tomorrow, all of your builds will break if you depend on them being available.

I understand relying on RubyGems, NPM, etc., but commercial theme and plugin companies go out of business/switch licensing models/etc. all of the time.

[helloworld151]

Very true, I do want to be able to fetch the most up to date version of these plugins though, and doing this manually is very annoying. And having to maintain a private version that I have to constantly update is almost as annoying.

I just wish WordPress companies would join 2015 already. So many of them are stuck in the late early 00s.

And to think that WP powers more than a fifth of the web.