The end of the day, sponge wants to be on the correct side of the modding community by abiding to the Minecraft EULA, so selling plugins wont be a thing on ore (not to say that another service would come up that allowed selling - this is what happened with the bukkit api with dev.bukkit being the main place for bukkit plugins and then spigot came along).
As for this community being dead but looks like its active. I beg to differ. I personally am very active on the forums helping where I can, as a result of this i see a lot of questions from developers to be, server owners, etc. with most of the questions being asked by different accounts. While most of the errors are about spongeforge and compatibility with another mod (something bukkit will never do) they are still part of the community.
I also get a few private messages with questions from accounts i dont regonise too, asking for help.
The other thing is Ore itself. It was said on SOS that ORE 2.0 will remove keys, it was then stated āit was a barrier of entry for some peopleā implying it was too difficult to do for some, so now ORE 2.0 has been released you may see a lot more ore plugins come in. It wont be near the amount of plugins that bukkit has but it should be more
Well, better is relative and does the community really need to be bigger? As long as the API is viable and thereās an appropriate amount of support does it really matter? In the end Sponge is a highly functional API that is in line with the EULA and thatās a good thing.
Personally for me, one of the biggest reasons why I switched to Sponge early on was because I had concerns Microsoft would use the EULA to exercise control over server management and/or modding so they could monitize those aspects of Minecraft, which I still think is a very legitimate concern.
I hope the Sponge Community continues to grow overtime, but if not thatās okay too because Sponge is able to provide everything I need. I also donāt have to worry that I may someday have to shut my server down for violating the EULA.
I see both concerns, but the main concern myself and others do have is that the fact that very few devs here have control over the āmarketā and a ton of us are paying through the nose for things to be made/ported here. Its the whole reason we dont get why they can charge in one section, but people cant sell plugins here since should both technically be against the EULA?
Any Mods you create for the Game from scratch belong to you (including pre-run Mods and in-memory Mods) and you can do whatever you want with them, as long as you donāt sell them for money / try to make money from them and so long as you donāt distribute Modded Versions of the Game
What is clear here is that selling mods and plugins is absolutely a no-go - you cannot create something to sell, i.e. selling a product. If, on the other hand, you reverse that statement, that is, selling the ability to create, more generally, provide a service, thatās not covered in the EULA.
Simply put, you can sell your time to create that content because youāre not selling the content itself, the time you spend on creating content, and as such, that content, is owned by the person who bought it (or with terms to that effect). Thatās what our Services Exchange is for, developers and other services for creating content and providing services.
You cannot sell the content, just the time taken to make it for someone.