Startups and this kind of business trap are not unique to the first world. As well, your comment is sort of generic isn't it? I could imagine it on virtually every post here
It's already solved some problems I was blocked on for side-projects. I don't feel I have spent energy, and will go back to Opus after July 7th, minus a few hard problems being solved.
Even so, what's wrong with this? They told you up front that they're going to discriminate. Students can use the code freely, businesses may struggle. People don't need to be fair.
That reminds me of the early work on the internet arguing that the amount of global connectivity wouldn't scale due to power laws. In a way, they were assuming a system like these global world sims. The equivalent of static routing (players that want to play together enter same server) exists, but the "dynamic routing" field is mostly a game of selecting which illusion to present the player (sometimes, it's okay to just stick people on a different instance but make sure their friend group is preferentially on the same one, etc).