Not giving away something for free (as in freedom) but asking for free legal advice may sound ironic but it's not about the money, it's about having something reliable for a very common use case.
BTW, please mind the distinction between open-source software and Free Software. You don't have to like the FSF, but the distinction they recognize is important.
I don't suggest that the Linux kernel be distributed under non-commercial terms, and I agree with you that such a project wouldn't have done well.
>BTW, please mind the distinction between open-source software and Free Software. You don't have to like the FSF, but the distinction they recognize is important.
Right, so there are 3 levels of "purity" here. For the record, I didn't run afoul of any of them; I intentionally distinguished my suggestion as "source available", not "open-source".
There is "Free Software", which is software meeting Stallman's "Four Freedoms".
There is "Open Source", typically referred to as the improper noun "open-source", which activists insist refers solely to license approved by the OSI (Open Source Initiative). Because these include permissive licenses, the FSF considers them potentially non-free, and makes the point that Open Source isn't good enough; it must be Free Software.
Then there is "source available", insisted upon by the OSI people, to indicate that while you can download and modify the source, it is not distributed under copyright terms they like. This would be source distributed only for non-commercial use, for example. Jef Raskin's Archy project (apparently now dead) [0] was distributed under CC BY-NC-SA and made this distinction.
You can make your software "source available", i.e., not open-source under activist definitions but still have a GitHub repo and all that, and restrict [heavy?] commercial use. I think it'd be interesting to see more open-source devs take that route and stop giving away the farm.
This will still allow people to use your stuff, developers will get familiar with the tooling and expect to be able to use it at work, and companies that have the dough can be compelled to pony up for a license.
On Windows, there is still an underappreciated market for cheap early-90s-shareware-style applications that are < $100 a pop, but I think most of them think that sharing the source means they have to enter the poor house, which is sad. We should show people that there's a way to share your source without bankrupting yourself in the meantime.
The GPL almost gets there, as it makes large-scale commercial use undesirable due to its infectious nature, which allows for dual-licensing, but with everything server-side nowadays, those stipulations are much less effective (have to go AGPL).