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Mr Mullenweg outlines what the WP.com Marketplace concept entails:
At the end of the day, it’s just a market. I’m sure styles, pricing strategies, and more will develop over time.
Themes would be on sale to wordpress.com users, free to self-install users (care of the GPL) and would split income to both developer and Automattic alike. Although it’s hardly surprising people are a tad polarised on the topic.
Given there are a number of add-on options already on sale, themery will merely add to the existing pay-per-view line-up strengthening the .com brand, via strong value add — hardly a malicious act in of itself.
A recent entry over at The Blog Herald by David Peralty, seems to be polarising views somewhat:
Creating such a marketplace, to me, is basically saying that no themes can make money, unless Matt is getting a cut of the proceeds, and that doesn’t seem right.
It’s really not about the money, even if Matt sends occasional mixed signals. Nor does the latest yet-to-be-launched product out of the Automattic stables, have anything to do with theme sponsorship.
Rather it is clear that Matt is very strongly committed to product and brand control. Recent trends towards the strong commercialisation of wordpress.com and the GPL’d self-install Wordpress itself to an extent do illustrate that clearly.
