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AGPL doesn't address the issue that is driving many of these license changes. The problem they are trying to deal with is that they have some product that is u
by tzs 3y ago
AGPL doesn't address the issue that is driving many of these license changes.
The problem they are trying to deal with is that they have some product that is useful on servers that they have released under a license like Apache or GPL, and they make their money by selling hosting and support, and big hosting companies like AWS start including the product for free as part of their own hosting offerings or start selling support.
AGPL would only discourage that if the big hosting company wanted to make modifications to the project and keep those private. But the threat to the project is not that say AWS is going to make a better version of the product. It is that they are going to make it more convenient and cheap for their hosting customers. They will either not need to make any changes for that, or the changes they make would probably not be useful to anyone else and releasing them won't bother them.
Look at MongoDB. That was under AGPL for several years and they switched away because it was not stopping cloud providers from competing with them on MongoDB hosting.