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I'd guess it's for making really sure that AGPL code doesn't end up in a published service by accident.

• danamit 5y ago
  Probably for making sure they won't give up work for free. Say you used an AGPL software that you had to make 10x times faster, being forced to giveaway something like that for Google is not good. At least they'd wanna have the option.
  • enneff 5y ago
    As a google employee I think by far the most likely outcome of that scenario (where a google engineer modifies a piece of OSS to make it significantly better) would be that engineer using a lightweight process to get permission to contribute to that project (if it’s not already white listed for contributions) and then sending the improvements to be merged upstream. There are many, many open source contributors at google and there is an entire group of people staffed to work on open source, among their responsibilities is to make it easy for google engineers to contribute to open source projects (both in their spare time and also as part of their daily work).
  • seoaeu 5y ago
    Presumably the bigger fear is that some AGPL program gets linked into their monorepo and the entire multi-billion line codebase is considered a "derivative work"