One thing I mention to folks that seem to think AGPL "protects you" against a major corporation incorporating your product into a SaaS product: it mostly doesn't.

It isn't written about often, but it's the reason many "open core" companies moved away from AGPL to protect their revenue from larger SaaS/IaaS/PaaS players from eating their lunch.

Some writings are:

- https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/01/24/Reading-AGPL

- https://katedowninglaw.com/2019/09/08/the-great-open-source-...

- https://drewdevault.com/blog/Anti-AGPL-propaganda/

Law does not run on a CPU with certainty. There is risk analysis going on: there are many jurisdictions at play. When you are big enough, something that has fundamentally viral characteristics by design can have catastrophic impact even if reading of the license as linked would be almost certainly accepted as correct and likely. Therefore, especially for a company like Google that has a unified codebase, that treatment is justified. So goes for other big companies who would be at least wary of just taking AGPL.

It kinda does have that effect, because large companies are allergic to AGPL by policy, even if they otherwise have processes to get GPL software into use. The very companies that have the pocketbook to pay for your software, are also structurally incapable of using it as FOSS. Smaller ones that are more agile about how they incorporate it, have less willingness to pay for a different license.