> Just out of curiosity, what is your main concern about a paid subscription > service? If the subscription were very low-priced and the benefits > were significant, I don't see how anyone would mind contributing to the > effort financially.
My primary concern is that it isn't open, nor does it foster a community that promotes openness. It's important to note that nothing about a paid plugin system would actually make it such that a plugin would be maintained indefinitely. Obviously, that's an inherent risk - and you see similar situations arrise in the Perl and Drupal communities (both of which have active module development efforts). However, this is far less of an issue now, since we have a central page for plugins and plugin code to be hosted. That's a really important first step - and one that can be used to maintain plugin longevity in the future. The second important step will be to provide significant hosting resources for plugins (for providing documentation, demos, etc.) - that way that information can be centralized as well. (And if it's maintained in wiki form, it can be updated and fixed by the community.) I don't think you should be terribly concerned about a situation where a favorite plugin falls by the wayside - if the plugin is of a reasonable size then most likely it'll be easily patchable and maintainable (and if the code is maintained in the central jQuery SVN, then any number of developers can help with the effort as well.) If the author has truly gone AWOL, then we can definitely transfer maintenance rights over to another user. --John
