> that seems in practice to make them more likely, not less, to not only use but also contribute back to the permissively licensed project. Yes, and that's goo

> that seems in practice to make them more likely, not less, to not only use but also contribute back to the permissively licensed project. Yes, and that's good! I agree that open source is a better way of making better software. Suppose your software is in a particularly innovative area (AI, cloud-based marketing buzzword generation, whatever's fashionable) where there's first-mover advantage; or in an area where there's a network effect. In those situations, Evil Corp might plausibly want to embrace, extend and out-compete the community-driven effort. Google Play essentially did this with AOSP: embrace and extend with proprietary features. Consumers choose the larger feature-set over the community-driven competitor. So the AGPL can defend community-driven projects from being out-competed by in-house projects who take permissively-licensed code and choose not to contribute back. > spend the money to reimplement your system with a permissive license as well as building proprietary extensions Yes, and that's fine. They may lose the first-mover advantage if the AGPL community-driven software can get into users' hands first. And they don't have the leg-up of simply importing code from the community project. This helps the community project to compete.