EDIT2: http://www.affero.org/oagf.html#How_does_this_license_treat_...
Specifically, the question, "How does this license treat commercial enterprise use over intranets and internal networks?"
Yes.
I was just pointing out that regardless of modification/distribution/whatever, bigco policy is to not allow ANY AGPL code within a 10 mile radius of any computer owned by said company.
The author(s) are free to use AGPL, but there are significant downsides if they care about adoption.
Non-adoption by non-respecters of freedom isn't a downside.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13342657 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13342804
I'm all for the moral stance, but moral purity in a vacuum is essentially irrelevant. Effective morality is about impact on the world. A morality that's only about the good feelings of the purist is sterile self-indulgence.
Wait, that seems extremely paranoid, even if only meant figuratively... Can you explain the thinking on restricting the use of AGPL'd licensed applications?
The AGPL treats web publishing as the same as binary distribution. If a bigco (e.g. Google) used AGPL code as part of a web service (e.g a web-based email client) there is a risk that they'd be required to comply with requests for source code. It's a pretty scary license. I wouldn't touch it... and I run a teeny tiny little speck of a website by comparison.
Meanwhile, it's much easier for a BigCo to have a blanket policy for a license which has incredibly high theoretical dangers and little clarity around its scope. And I don't blame them.
These are the legal landmines that BigCos want to avoid, mainly because they're questions that have not really been decided.
So unless you want to offer Alacritty-as-a-Service, you should be just fine with the license.
At a large company, the stakes get large in two ways. One is that all the numbers are just larger. But more important is that an individual decision maker's career success can become dependent on a relatively small number of things. E.g., if a lawyer approves a license that should be fine but actually isn't, that could substantially harm career prospects. It still may be a small problem overall for a major company, but if it means somebody gets fired, those are pretty big stakes.
And even if not, developers might use internal code search, find what they want, and then copy and paste. The pushback on AGPL code (and GPL code even) comes from the difficulty of establishing internal policies to keep the code segregated. Much easier to have simple-to-undersatnd policies enforced at the boundaries, e.g. "no AGPL, period", instead of "AGPL code is OK for software that won't interface with our systems, as determined by either biased engineers or technically-shaky lawyers."