"Then they started requiring paid plans for _all_ publishers that are not purely community projects. Doesn't matter how open it is, if it's backed by a commercial company, they require a paid plan."

This is factually incorrect and has been documented and discussed many times. The issue at hand is if something is open source vs "open source" but is really a free to paid go to market motion. This includes "open source" sdks that are only really used to build products against a paid commercial service.

We spend great time and care assessing each situation and discussing the results with the companies engaged with us to reach a fair conclusion.

If you think we got something wrong here, all you have to do is reach out and we are happy to walk you through what we see and drive to resolution.

--Brian (cofounder/CTO Sonatype)