Thank you all for your feedback. It looks like the majority of folks have no problem with company employees or plugin developers giving their work 5 star reviews just as long as a disclaimer accompanied the review. I find no problem with that as well.

A few of you brought up the issue of this possibly being against the law. I'm curious as to how that would come into play considering there is no exchange of money when downloading plugins on the repository? Probably not the best place to ask for legal advice but we can discuss that aspect a little bit more.

Also, as I mentioned in the post, I'm in agreement with others that unless a company employs a large number of people and tells them to provide 5 star reviews or pays for those reviews, that there are enough legitimate reviews coming from end users that the overall data would not be tainted.

Regarding the State Of The Word Reference, I looked it up and Matt mentioned that all ratings were attached to reviews meaning you can't give a rating without giving a comment. And those reviews can be changed later. "In the future, the current way in which the plugin review/rating system works will be retired. The reviews will be 100% driven by plugins. The plugin review/ratings system will undergo a reset." 11:10 in the State Of The Word Video http://wordpress.tv/2013/07/29/matt-mullenweg-state-of-the-word-2013/ I don't know what that means that ratings and reviews will be driven by plugins.

It's not like you can hide in the shadows while giving plugins ratings and reviews. They are tied to your WordPress.org user profile which I would have thought would prevent this sort of thing from happening. I guess if no one is paying attention, it's easy to do.

As others have noted, ethics is relative to ones' moral beliefs and we could debate ethics all we want but at the same time, we were able discuss acceptable forms of selfy ratings and reviews while concluding that the overall practice should be discouraged.

@Kevinjohn Gallagher - I'm not sure I understand your question concerning WPTavern and ethics. I don't know of any particular sites that were removed from the dashboard feed around the same time WPTavern was purchased. At one point, WPCandy was added and then at some point, removed from the feed but it had nothing to do with WPTavern. I could care less if WPTavern is in the Dashboard or not anymore. I'd rather not be in it. On the flip side, I'd like to see the dashboard feed remove inactive, off topic sites and add a bunch of relevant WP dedicated sites. I shared these thoughts with Matt but he responded that the dashboard feed was not very high on any priority list. It's in his control, not mine.

Maybe we should discuss “best practices” and “guidelines”. Ethics is too much of an argument about moral philosophy :)

I touched on this up above but you're right. At the same time, the comments laid out some good guidelines and best practices so we were able to kill two birds with one stone :)

I'm thinking of writing a follow up post that suggests best practices as stated by a number of commenters on this article.