My vote is yes, I think plugins should have source. There are many situations where it’s just not feasible to wait on an author, or to have them consult/work on some specific feature that a team might need to work with a given . It also neatly handles the case (fairly common in this type of scenario) where a author stops updating/supporting their . With closed-source plugins, that means the effectively dies on the spot. If source is available, the community users of the will inevitably update it themselves.
I think it’s worth doing just to avoid the situation these development Marketplaces run into where half the store is filled with out of date plugins from a host of various versions, with many of them not being updated by their authors.
With source for plugins, we could see long term support for all sorts of plugins, without them going stagnant and dying off.
authors that don’t want to release source can always presumably sell their through their own site. But I think most developers would be happy providing source.
This is less of an issue that you’d imagine - there are tools to identify stuff like that, and also it’s pretty easy to tell that, e.g., Bob’s Ocean , that functions identically and looks just like VaOcean, is a clone.