WordPress basic, which doesn’t have much functionality may be free and open, but the meat of it, the plugins, aren’t.
The WordPress plugin ecosystem has grown from being an useful extension framework to a monster of “shareware”, trialware only set out to make a sale.
Even the spamfilter Akismet, which once used to be free to all, isn’t free anymore. The restriction that you can’t have ads on your site for it to be free is not realistic.
This site for instance doesn’t even generate enough money to be able to afford the smallest, cheapest VPS. If I’m lucky I get 1 or 2 clicks / month.
Because all the visitors here have adblockers enabled, since it’s a technical savvy blog.
The code quality of those plugins is questionable, some even insert ads in your admin UI. I don’t have to explain the security implications.
The solution?
– Liberate WordPress Plugins. You should be able to change the plugin repository, just like you have multiple app stores on Android, you could have multiple plugin repositories.
– Move away from WordPress