Eh, I guess that's your opinion. Personally, people don't have any obligation to release anything. What you say may be easy to say if you don't actually develop anything, but from people who do, it does take time and effort. I understand not everyone is as fluent a coder as I am, and they may take more effort to achieve something.
Surely, having it available and charging for it is better than no-one releasing it at all, right?
I understand people trying to justify the time they spend, that's fine. I personally don't think that the amount charged can justifiably cover the time spent on development, but people have different tastes and needs. I would earn a lot more from my job than I probably would if I tried selling my plugins.
Again, I don't care whether or not people decide to sell their stuff. They don't have any obligation to contribute back at all, and they are free to do whatever they want with their work - it's purely their decision.
I was just talking about the general environment being negative to people who don't want to charge anything.
But anyway, your issue arises due to lack of competition. I don't think promoting paid plugins is a particularly bad thing in their situation,
but promoting them to the level they do now is too much IMO.
Also, sorry to say this, but I don't make plugins to be in some sort of hypothetical battle with "evil" paid plugin developers. If I want a "battle", I'd go play an online game. I do this out of enjoyment's sake, and ultimately don't care about "giving them what they want". The environment is actually only one factor why I'm losing interest in this. Other reasons include the fact that PHP is a piss easy language and doesn't really present many challenges, and thus, isn't particularly intellectually stimulating.
As stated earlier, I pretty much only develop for my own website, and I don't mind providing some support, especially to exceptionally helpful members such as RateU
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