| Because selling stuff requires more effort than just "here's my price, pay me". By doing that, you've put your code into the realm of "commercial software", which engages with companies/corporate use in a whole different modality. If you've never sold software to a business, you will have no idea how much is involved in this side of things. In addition to being treated differently by your potential customers, you will also earn the hatred and ire of your open-source-loving colleagues. Some bored college kid will see your dual-licensed software as an immoral act, and spend time building a less-awesome and more incomplete "completely free" version, which will then attract dev mindshare and users and eventually ossify into a de facto standard which you will then have to support. That college kid will one day graduate, and think he can build a business on top of this amazing software he's made that everyone loves and wants to use, and then sit around trying to figure out how to make money from it. He may even consider making a "free-mium" model or an "enterprise" offering on top of the "open core" of his widely adopted OSS. These will most likely fail, because - again - SELLING THINGS IS HARD. Then you and this college kid who disrupted your dual-licensed OSS will one day meet at a symposium for "open source sustainability". It will be awkward. Teeth will be gnashed. You will get lectured about not having just used Patreon. Meanwhile the companies that use your and the college kid's OSS continue to hit their quarterly numbers for Wall Street. Executives earn out bonuses. The circle of life continues. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ |