Paid plugin market and how to solve unmaintained plugins

Feature requests
1

Use case or problem

I’ve noticed that many excellent plugins haven’t been updated for years. If bugs need to be fixed, the only option is to fork the plugin on GitHub. However, even if I want to continue maintaining such a plugin, it’s very difficult to gather a community comparable to the original one, and the ecosystem becomes highly fragmented.

Proposed solution

I’m wondering whether Obsidian has considered allowing paid plugins (directly through Obsidian plugin market) in the future, as this could help incentivize authors to continue maintaining their work.
Alternatively, could Obsidian introduce a mechanism where, if a free plugin has not been updated for many years, others are allowed to fork it, and the original plugin page in the Obsidian plugin marketplace would indicate that there is an actively maintained fork? This would allow new maintainers to rebuild a community around the plugin. (maybe already implemented?)

Current workaround (optional)

Related feature requests (optional)

3 Likes
2

Ideas like this have come up a few times. Unfortunately I can’t find the one where this point was made (maybe it was on Discord): plugin developers tend to be constrained more by time than money, and plugin income is unlikely to be large enough to pull them away from a day job (or college).

Obsidian already always developers to include donation links in plugin listings, and plugins are allowed to charge for functionality (tho payment is handled by the developer, not the plugin gallery); Remotely Save does this.

Here are some prior discussions: