That's a fairly traditional approach for academic software: source made available but under a non-commercial/research-purposes style license, and a commercial license sold for commercial uses. It's been successful in some cases, mainly when active effort is made to sell the commercial product (e.g. through a spinoff company).
Just a standard GPL+commercial or AGPL+commercial dual-licensing route also works for some companies, without having to add on an explicit "non-commercial" restriction. Depends on the software and the market. MySQL made money doing that for years, for example. Qt also does something like that, although they further enhance the commercial version with closed-source features in the Enterprise tier (another common way of differentiating).
The mission of Snowdrift.coop, the site mentioned in the original article is to fund things specifically without relying on artificial restrictions like proprietary licensing.
Just a standard GPL+commercial or AGPL+commercial dual-licensing route also works for some companies, without having to add on an explicit "non-commercial" restriction. Depends on the software and the market. MySQL made money doing that for years, for example. Qt also does something like that, although they further enhance the commercial version with closed-source features in the Enterprise tier (another common way of differentiating).