I understand that writing code is an artform that takes lots of practice and patience and also deserves a lot of praise. I'm not saying that people shouldn't be allowed to make money off of their code. I DO think that support contracts are generally a more reasonable way of achieving this goal.

By closing off your source code from the community at large, you prevent people from auditing, extending, and improving your codebase. There IS power in the masses, and such a power can be used to offload the work that you DO NOT want to do, such as achieving portability, to those who actually care about it.