Alex King has published a great post today about Open Source Motivations.

One comment stood out for me:

Unless the WordPress community at large starts to better recognize and reward the developers that create the tools that they use and rely on, the developers won’t/can’t continue to provide as they have.

I think the community wants to reward developers. The donations Alex receives are proof. The problem is the lack of a structured mechanism for such rewards, which means non-technical members of the community feel powerless, leading to the rudeness Alex mentions.

As demonstrated by the massive drop in donations Alex experienced when WordPress.org changed how it presented plugins, an avenue for rewards can make all the difference. That’s why a friend and I are building one on the Prospress Marketplace Platform.