That's true and I'll argue that's a feature not a bug.
It's also by design. The OSI specifically does not allow "for educational use only" and other types of usage discrimination. "The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research."
IMO, this was one of the things that open source software licensing got right. Non-commercial licensing of open source is intuitively appealing and is also a great way to not get software adopted.
You're correct that CC, by contrast, does have an NC clause as an option. Even leaving aside philosophical points, I hold that this is a not a good license variant. Just about anything that isn't a trivial use has some commercial element to it. And what I might rationalize as non-commercial may well be different from what the copyright holder considers non-commercial.
It's probably telling that CC has been kicking around the NC problem for something like a decade at this point and AFAIK is no closer to putting a stake in the ground now than they were then.
See also: https://www.cnet.com/news/does-the-noncommercial-creative-co...
I long for a world in which someone can make a living out of open source work, similarly to those making a living out of games, mobile apps, youtube videos etc, without having to either work at a company or creating extremely restrictively-licensed software.
And very few indie game/mobile developers or would-be YouTube stars make a decent living out of it either however they license or sell their work. Same for most writers, independent consultants, etc. Being a freelancer is hard and doubly so when you're selling things that aren't necessities and have a lot of competition.
Unfortunately the AGPL has a chilling effect on using the software at all (see RethinkDB). I suspect the same would be true of any almost-but-not-quite-OSS license.
Apparently NPOSL addresses an issue with some non-profits making warranties, not to restrict usage to non-profits:
http://marlacorinne.4parkers.com/2014/06/20/non-commercial-o...
When I see people asking if they can do this, they get laughed out of the room by others who claim that "open source freedoms" does not restrict commercial use.
This is kind of a serious issue. Artists get such a license, a high quality one (CC-BY-NC). Programmers don't. Programmers are not licensing law experts, they won't make their own, and if they do they won't do it right.
If you make it as easy to ask commercial bodies for money and still be OSS as it is to just build stuff for free, this story you mention will happen far more often.