And just to be really clear -- it's not actually a solution to cloud providers not reusing the code for profit (which I assume is the context you're implying, could be wrong here), because AGPL is free software, so people are free to reuse your code for commercial purposes. AGPL at least prevents making private improvements to open source networked code without contributing back.
I think in this situation it might have convinced Microsoft to contribute rather than fork... But then again, it's Microsoft. Also, they're well under their right to fork and keep the changes as long as the license stays the same, etc.
I think another important point might be that "free software" aims to protect the users of free software, not necessarily the profit-maximizing (I mean to use that phrase neutrally) ability of software developers.
The AGPL doesn't require them to contribute back. It only requires them to provide the code to end users upon request. No license as far as I know requires people to contribute back.
In many cases, project maintainers would not want the changed code anyway because it does not align with their vision for how things should be done. Linus Torvalds and his subsystem maintainers, for example, do not want people to send them code dumps containing the hacks people have done to private Linux source trees. They want proper commits that are done well and have been modified to comply with any feedback that they provide.
What the project maintainer here wanted were collaborators who would work with him as a team (which is not much different than what most OSS developers what), but no license requires that and it is rare to get that.
It is in a roundabout way also about collaboration with upstream, since the users (or those working for them) are fully empowered to be developers if they so choose.
And the upstream and buy the product and get the same rights as a user.
The biggest thing that GPL et al. enable is that customers are not locked in to their provider.
It's not as much about the collaboration by the vendor per se, though users would likely prefer it, and are themselves able to collaborate on equal footing.
The problem is that it scares away also others. Personally I avoid such projects for any purpose, they simply don't exist for me.
I also don't understand the cloud hosting argument, when we had a great whole era of Apache/PHP/MySQL stack based on exactly this idea of commercial hosting.
> The problem is that it scares away also others. Personally I avoid such projects for any purpose, they simply don't exist for me.
I think this isn’t a problem — not everyone has to contribute to any project! People sometimes struggle with the choice between GPL and MIT for similar reasons of popularity.
People who want the widest possible usage/corporate adoption can pick licenses that reflect that and embrace the tradeoff
The anger over cloud hosting came from a specific set of Open Source companies that produced cloud software with the intention of earning money by selling hosting. Mongo, Elastic, and Hashicorp were the big ones. These companies failed to realize that the licenses they chose were incompatible with the business model they chose and then blamed the resellers for their own failure to plan.
It was particularly problematic for the FOSS companies because each of these players' plans was to resell the Big Three clouds and live off of the margin, so the instant that the cloud providers decided to just directly compete in the hosting space the original company physically couldn't compete on price.
The moral of the story is that if you're releasing cloud software as FOSS you can't plan your business around the idea that you'll be the only hoster.
