Slashdot Mirror
Google Starts Charging a Signup Fee For Chrome Extension Developers
trooperer writes "On Thursday, Google introduced two significant changes in the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery: a developer signup fee and a domain verification system. The signup fee is a one-time payment of $5. The announcement says its purpose is to 'create better safeguards against fraudulent extensions in the gallery and limit the activity of malicious developer accounts.' Developers who already registered with the gallery can continue to update their extensions and publish new items without paying the fee."
Google also made available a developer preview for the Chrome Web Store.
I won't budge until they drop the fee to 4.99.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
It is also a good filter against random trouble makers.
Rich Kaynka (Something Awful) actually talked about this that you get some people, kids in particular, with a lot of time on their hands who will spend it making life difficult for you. In his case it was someone repeatedly spamming stupid shit on the forums. One thing that does a nice job of eliminating that is a small charge. Reason is that you have to be at least somewhat serious to be willing to pay that.
As you said, it wont' stop someone who really wants to make an evil extension (though verifiability helps with that), but it'll probably stop people who just want to be a pain in the ass and submit lots of stupid and/or non functional extensions to try and cause trouble. It's easy to create hundreds of bogus accounts and post crap with them. It is hard to spend hundreds of dollars to do the same.