off-topic but i’m so licensing ignorant that each time something like this comes up i have no idea what’s being said. is there a good ELI5 resource where i can get started with licensing permissiveness?

You can build closed source products into and on top of MIT and Apache licenses. AGPL code can’t be a part of a project unless you license everything that you write as a GPL kind of license as well.

I like the website GitHub put together, here’s the AGPL v3 page: https://choosealicense.com/licenses/agpl-3.0

For an explanation in practice see below. From someone pro-AGPL seeking enforcement of the licence.

https://raymii.org/s/blog/I_enforced_the_AGPL_on_my_code_her...

GNU is a good source for copyleft license info. Iirc they also address other open source licenses. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html. Also https://choosealicense.com/ is good for some tldr info

I hate that copyleft licensed software should be viable for companies, but they are often too scared to tap into open source as a mistake they might end up forcing companies to open source everything according to faint hearted busy/lazy legal teams.

At Google I was somehow allowed to use Emacs for development, but new copyleft software was immediately dismissed by legal, even if it's source was not getting into /google3 nor leaving my laptop.

how this type of licencing affects people that are not google et. al. in big companies? e.g. I am bootstrap/indie dev doing a small SaaS? Should I be concerned?

Short answer: yes. The AGPL should be avoided at all costs because it has never been robustly tested in court and its unclear what the licensing implications actually are.

There are various explanations in plain english sometimes offered about how the AGPL will apply. None of these are true.

Companies that have a made a business decision to provide AGPL licensed code do so with the understanding that no serious business will ever consider using such a product in their software stack. If you choose an AGPL licensed product it will (rightly) become a gigantic headache at some point. It will certainly become a problem if anyone does due diligence.

Most companies that provide AGPL, including us (ParadeDB) also offer a commercial license for interested companies. Several successful software companies (Grafana, MinIO, Citus, etc.) have chosen to be AGPL to thread the needle between being true OSS while also managing to monetize their offering :)

It will bite you when you try to sell your company and they do due diligence. CitusDB was also AGPL-licensed at one point, not sure if they still are.

Still, AGPL is a proper open-source license, unlike the sleazy fake ones adopted by Redis, Elastic or MongoDB.