“ a federated and independent repository of trusted plugins and themes for web hosts, commercial plugin and tool developers in the WordPress ecosystem and end users.” The goal of this project is blurred. They want to move away from WP and allow commercial plug-ins. Both are very hard to accomplish. Forking WP and build a community was more transparant and easier to do. Since WP is gpl , there has for a long time been too many violations by commercial plugin sellers. You can sell your plug-in, but you must apply with the gpl terms. So release all the code. Too many plugins are malware, since code is loaded by an api call. No trust, no security and no privacy.