You've got a team of cracker jack developers who introduce a product that, frankly, isn't ready for prime time by any sane person's definition with the goal of targeting the majority of developers (e.g., not the most experienced, and not the ones operating at the top end of scale), with no real mention of license?
I expected it to be a commercially licensed language, and honestly, was perfectly happy with that. This is of course better, but leaves me wondering just a little more what the business model is. Not that it's going to stop me toying with it -- I think Meteor is the best JS framework I've seen for ease of use.
I would suspect the business model will be support and feature development. In a widely used framework, there will always be people who need it customized, or need to integrate it in new and interesting ways, or require some sort of commercial support contract in order to use it. If they make these options available early on, they will make money.
I was surprised as well. I got a little scared when I read their email announcement earlier this week where they talked about this license announcement. I fully expected it to be some sort of commercial license due to the lack of information given previously and the polish that even their prototype unfinished product had.
As for the business model, I could possibly see them doing hosting. Although there's no shortage of node.js hosts, they could fine tune their service to work well with the Meteor framework and integrate it in a way that a generic node.js host wouldn't be.
