Well under the AGPL they are required to release the code… Sorry, but that's copyright law and that's the copyleft licence.
No that's the GPL you're thinking of. AGPL requires the source code be shared out to everyone once (roughly) people access it.
Software that is no actually distributed externally, but is interacted by the public is the express target of the AGPL licence. They would have thought of how to cover the "non-distribution" case.
> Not true. Copyright includes the right to control how a work
> may be performed publicly. I presume this allows the AGPL to
> enter a "You may only make this work available publically if
> you do X, Y and Z."
For example, if there was an AGPL'd binary which would render a PDF to a PNG, I could host it on my server and let people interact with it but not release the source. The reason I do not have to release the source is that I am not distributing the binary.
The AGPL is designed for cases where interaction requires that part of the work itself be sent to the user -- examples are web pages, Java applets, and so on.
These seems exactly like the use case of the AGPL, which I why I think they would have covered that.
(Web Pages (of a web application) are the rendered output of programmes on the server side, so would be the same as "a binary that made a PDF into a PNG")