I’ve had this argument with people ad infinitum; it seems some people just see “AGPL” and any further thought process just stops.
“You could ask or pay for an alternate licence” or “you’re almost certainly not using this in a way that means you need to open source your entire product” and any other rational argument you can think of are just met with “yeah but agpl” and that’s apparently just the end of it.
The thing is, at that point, why not just put it under a proprietary license in the first place? Lots of companies simply don’t have AGPL on their list of legal approved open source licenses and they’re not going to change that for you. ADDED: If you want to go the dual licensing route, at least just state this up front.
Because AGPL is open source and not proprietary, that's the reason. Open source doesn't necessarily mean that anyone can use it as they please, they must abide by the terms of the license. If they don't want to, then they can find another project, or get a different license for it.
Depends on why you want an open-source license in the first place.
If it's to bait in companies to use your product and then offer more features under a proprietary license, then something that's more attractive to companies like a permissive (corporate charity) license is a better choice. If it's to ensure that everyone who uses the software can contribute to the development, something like the GPL or AGPL is better.
There can be other reasons to pick a corporate charity license, of course, but encouraging corporations to use your software is certainly one of the most common.
