“It turned out that smaller companies did not care about the license at all, and larger companies were not using it.”
Reinman wrote Nodemailer. A startup that used it sold for half a billion dollars and sent him one feature complaint. His AGPL plan with a 250€ MIT upsell made 750€ in 18 months. A license key that kills the app after 15 minutes made 1,750€ in the first month, and he has since raised the price to 895€ with no drop in customers. Companies don’t pay for open source. They pay when the software stops working.