Given the current debacle I am kicking around the idea of directing our team of engineers to adjust their priorities and allocating funding to infrastructure in order create a fully open Plugin and Theme repository for WordPress users. This would of course be completely free for anyone (including hosts) to use and have its own direct submission / management area for new plugins/themes to avoid what I see as an existential threat to the ecosystem – the loss or heavy degredation of ORG's current system.
I am curious if something like this would help alleviate any issues or solve any problems without creating new ones. Please let me know what you think, if it's dumb or might cause more problems we'll look for other ways to help.
If anyone here as experiences in building something similar that could help me understand what this would entail I would also appreciate hearing from you.
I have no advice to offer, but it’s a question I’ve been asking myself since WPE created their own mirror.
How feasible would it be for someone like WPE to create an offshoot/fork/whatever-you-want-to-call-it of the plugin and theme repos? Would that allow previously banned users from contributing plugins/themes again? How easy would it be to bring in plugins through the WP dashboard from those other locations – or would it need to be a manual download/upload scenario?
I don’t have the answers, just the questions..! Logically, it makes sense in my head if we’re looking at a future of uncertainty like that faced the last couple of weeks. But, beyond that, I don’t have the knowledge to give the answers.