Awesome article! I was in an organization which had an AGPL ban. After a couple of months with lawyers, it's now a major AGPL supporter. AGPL lets you build ecosystems around your software, where everyone contributes, and no one can parasitically compete with you. It's absolutely the right tool for a lot of uses.

I'm no longer with the organization, but it had:

* Hundreds of open-source contributors

* Millions of users, mostly paying

* Zero direct competitors using the software. With equal ground for technology, it'd be almost impossible to overcome first-mover and branding advantage unless the organization really messed up

* Hundreds of major open source users doing interesting things with the software and using it in non-competing contexts. That translated into product enhancements.

With GPL or BSD, it almost certainly would have played out as lots of competitors doing an extend-and-proprietize, and instead of a successful open company, it would have been a dead organization.

So many misconceptions abound.

The flip side, though, isn't that everyone should use the AGPL. You should have the right license for the right context.