In companies I’ve worked at in the past, during every round of fund raising, as part of the due diligence, lawyers would ask for the licenses of all software packages we use. And when AGPL showed up in the list, they’d specifically ask how it’s integrated with the rest of the system, and evaluate it with more scrutiny. In hindsight, this makes total sense - they were just trying to make sure we were compliant with what AGPL calls for.

But the fact that AGPL software called for extra scrutiny from lawyers, became a stumbling block and added just enough friction to adopting additional AGPL software in the stack.

Now being on the other side of the table as an OSS product, this is painful to watch.

I don’t have a grand plan to solve these misconceptions yet. Hoping that publicly talking about this and driving awareness about GPL and AGPL might help. Open to ideas!