Hi Frederic,
Thanks for describing the big picture in such details. I completely agree. Indeed providing a web shop for commercial plugin developers is an interesting business opportunity on its own.
My interest for triggering this discussion comes from the fact that I am currently involved in the development of Zend Studio - a PHP IDE based on Eclipse. We have our own solution for license management. There are some aspects of our solution that I want to improve. I've already done some research on the topic and I have some pieces that can be the base of a prototype for a license management solution in Eclipse.
Have you considered open sourcing your license management solution, or part of it? If yes, then we can unite efforts in having a common solution for everybody who needs license management solution for commercial Eclipse plugins and products. Of course, it is just part of the big picture you've described, but still an important one. And having a good solution for it would make it easier to complete that big picture.
BTW, I've installed CtrlFlow to get a taste of you licensing framework and got a problem while requesting the trial license [1]. Looks like a server-side issue. Eventually, it succeeded in the end.
I am also curious why bug 409269 had no progress.
Greetings,
Kaloyan