First, Shaun you are not alone. When puru abandoned his store he let alot of his loyal customers down and i also never expected he would ever do such a thing, but as you said the reality is just that and its sad to see.
Now for the bad news...
1. The plugins will always legally belong to puru, regardless of what anyone does, that code is his intellectual property. He wrote it, he owns it and that is also reality.
2. You will not be able to take control of that plugin and you will not be able to sell that plugin in the store. Regardless if you feel its the right thing to do. Legally it is his property. And the only ways to not have that be the case is if he comes on the forum and gives them away in writing along with contacting Oxwall to verify that is what he wants to do.
Even if he made the plugins for free it would still be his property. He has to come on the forum or contact Oxwall and literally tell us and them that he does not care what happens to them, that he no longer wants rights to them and gives those rights away. Short of that there is nothing we can do and unless Oxwall changes its policy on the matter we are stuck.
The other way is to have someone do a new plugin using their own code which im surprised Aron has not done yet since he seems to be first in line to copy everyones ideas around here. And i dont mean that in a good way either. :(
3. You must accept the fact as was stated in the conversation we had about this before
https://developers.oxwall.com/forum/topic/49420
that this is not just an issue with Oxwall this is an issue with every single open source store on the market. Devs come and devs go, dont believe me take a look at the plugins for elgg. Tons of them have a warnings on them that they have not been developed in 3+ years or more. The dif is that they are free... But its the same everywhere paid and free stores. It has been tried in the past to hold developers accountable but its almost impossible to do because even if you have them sign a contract and they disregard it, what is the company suppose to do, fly to china or some other country and track them down. No, thats not gonna happen. Its just the way it is and it comes with the open source projects, its a fact of life.
4. Now there are some things that can be done to help offset that or to lesson that but in the end if a developer wants to make a few bucks and then dissappear and do nothing, there is nothing anyone can do at the moment unless policies change.
5. Ross does not handle the store in this way, he will either forward this to Den or move it to the store area of the forum.
Sorry to be the one giving bad news here, dont shoot the messenger ok please... :)