...Protections! And I have a suggestion for that:

Imagine I'm a smart-ass plugin dev (everybody knows that I'm not, just imagine), and I have some crazy ideas* I would like to realize...

But I'm also... super-greedy! I'm so hungry of dollar$, ¥ens, €uros that I could easily eat a bank!...
How to realize my dreams and satisfy my needs?

Now imagine a non-profit organization, which is dedicated to the task of... by chance... arouse interest from the public, contact a lot of people (VIP artists, businesses, various structures and organizations...) for donations, and the most important: collect and handle money to redistribute it to developers, matching certain criterias.

Let's go, let's do it! I start developing my project, I possibly hire other people to help me, I work hard during weeks / months and...

...Now, today is the big, v1.0 release day! I open my page on the Organization's site, I start talking about my so-called 'revolutionary' product everywhere and... yeaaah! Miracle! Musicians are very interested and ask a lot of questions, producers start to think that, maybe, it could be "The Next Big Thing (TM)", everyone wanna download it and... here's the big difference:

People can download it for free, one just needs to open an account on the Org's site. Let say people are happy, so they make a lot of donations to The Org (let's call it that way), which redistributes it to the developers, depending on the success of her/his plugin, the quality of support and updates, the visitors' notations, the number of DLs, likes, reviews and articles on social networks, on magazines...

The (obvious) rule is: if no one gives, no one receives, and your page is closed after a pre-determined period of time. If you have not updated your plugin since, let's say, one year and a half, if you no more answer to the customers' inquiries and despise their remarks/bug reports/wishes, the said customers (donators) are very likely to be unhappy, so they will likely quickly stop expressing any interest to your plugin... that will ends your adventure.

On the other side, if no one gives, you stop working on your project (you don't work for free, remember?), now is time to imagine something else...

So: no need for shitty protections, no need to cripple your - commercial, NOT open source - software with timebombs, crypted licenses, dongles etc. The quantity of money you receive from The Org is proportional to the real interest and usage by the customers.

Side effects: the over-mega-crowded plugins market starts to sanitize, now the only gals/guys that make real money are those whose the plugin is really used and praised by customers, the others simply close their project's page / site / forum / wall, and of course always have the possibility to open a new one, with a new (kind of) product, etc...

I know that this kind of organization is common for OSS / Libre software, and that my idea looks like crowdfunding (except that in my idea, it would be an NPO-NGO, or a Foundation...), but I wanted to imagine how it could function with commercial, closed source projects.

(And I know Reaper functions a little like this: you pay when and if you want, there's also Ardour, but it's another kind of beast... Both are still very different from my idea.)

- - -
* And I actually have some really crazy ideas... Possibly too crazy...

 

the ones where the knobs change by moving your mouse left and right as opposed to up and down

 

And you end up changing the wrong knob on the left or right. Yeah, that also sucks ballz