[sjwright]

You might be thinking of Lesser GPL? It should be immediately obvious why any Bigco would treat the AGPL like an exploding canister of infected blood and sharps.

The AGPL treats web publishing as the same as binary distribution. If a bigco (e.g. Google) used AGPL code as part of a web service (e.g a web-based email client) there is a risk that they'd be required to comply with requests for source code. It's a pretty scary license. I wouldn't touch it... and I run a teeny tiny little speck of a website by comparison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License

[hvis]

Why would you use notty's code inside a web service?

[Godel_unicode]

This is the mindset that lead to people not realizing the impact of shellshock. If your webservice shells out to use any other tools (imagemagick for instance) the shell is now part of your app.

[_delirium]

A shell could conceivably be used in a webapp's backend, but a terminal emulator is a lot less likely.

[sjwright]

Which then begs the question why the author chose AGPL over regular GPL, if it's unlikely to ever apply in practice. What was the author worried about?

Meanwhile, it's much easier for a BigCo to have a blanket policy for a license which has incredibly high theoretical dangers and little clarity around its scope. And I don't blame them.