A lot of companies I've worked for had a blanket ban on AGPL. This is not a problem with the license, it's a problem with those companies. But it's still going to be a pain for the people who work there.

If more high-value projects adopt the AGPL, legal departments may be motivated to revisit those bans.

I drove a revisiting like this in more than one organization.

Fitting decisions like this around the status quo makes no sense. It's exactly actions like this which change the status quo. I'm happy to say there are dozens of organizations without AGPL bans thanks to one useful piece of code I wrote. Most are small, but one is in the tens of billions of dollars in valuation.

Yes, this is the main reason to welcome these recent adoptions of AGPL.

Blanket bans of licenses are bad for free software. More pressure to revisit them is a good thing.

I don't agree it is a problem with the companies. The issue most companies (and their lawyers) have is that this has not (afaik) really been tested in court. So, sure _you_ may state that we should be fine if are are not modifying the code or directly linking, etc, etc, but the interpretation of the license is still _very_ open. Until legal precedent is set, most companies are not willing to take the risk. And why should they?

Many companies (our included) consider AGPL to be a poison pill. and until someone gets sued and the courts set precedent...

> This is not a problem with the license, it's a problem with those companies. But it's still going to be a pain for the people who work there.

This sounds like a general problem, unrelated to licensing. If you work in companies with shitty policies, you are in for a world of pain.

These are big companies you would recognize. Shitty policies seem to go with the territory in large companies.

Most companies who publish AGPL software also offer a paid commercial license, so it is accept AGPL (and contribute in kind) or pay (and contribute in money).

I don't think this is bad forcing companies to choose between these two (or abandon the software), and they are fully responsible to making lives of people who work there easier.

Or for people who work at companies that have those companies as close clients.

Or put a proxy in front of it.

Indeed. I predict that year 2022 will be the year of a sidecar protocol proxy service.

That’s right.