Hot take, don't @ me: AGPL should never have been an OSI approved license.

The license is basically a compliance trap, and I would posit that > 99% of modified AGPL software violates the license.

This leads to a world where license enforcement is entirely up to arbitrary decisions by the copyright owner. Any contributor to an AGPL software package (without CLA) can go and mass-send C&Ds and/or request $$$, kind of like the Creative Commons copyright trolls have been doing for CC-BY violations.

That's without even getting into the fact that really, the AGPL is GPL + a "usage restriction" clause camouflaging as not being one (because that would be against the FSF's principles).

I suspect most of the AGPL users would be better served with some of the more permissive source-available licenses. Unfortunately, people seem to have allergic reactions to non-OSI approved licenses, and AGPL being OSI approved even though it sucks means it gets regarded more highly than better alternatives.

@delroth OSI approved the OpenWatcom license and it does what AGPL is trying to do more explicitly.

Ok, it still has some severe problems, but it's a lot more legally ironclad to say "you must publish private forks" than "you must implement a view source URL that may or may not get stripped out by a proxy".

Bonus points: You get to be Open Source but NOT Free Software! Perfect for running on GNU-less Linux distros like Alpine Linux.