Kaloyan – how did you get on with making your commercial plugin? I’d be interested to know your experience.
We made a WordPress plugin for our Magic Zoom tool. The tool is commercial (costs ￡25), though it is free for non-commercial websites. It is not released under the GPL so we are unable to include it in the WordPress plugin directory. Without a listing in the directory, we’ve found it hard to promote the tool, even though it is free for non-commercial use (most WordPress blogs are non-commercial).
My conclusion is that a different business model is needed to selling licenses. Many of the popular WordPress plugins generate revenue from ads on their sites and they request (optional) donations towards the development. The code is released under GPL, but the developers actually have a commercially viable plugin.
