[Conan_Kudo]

> This is a great question. Many people think the AGPL solves this problem but it absolutely does not. This is why MongoDB, which was AGPL licensed, just changed to a custom license.

If the goal is to kill off all potential vendors participating in your ecosystem, then yes, AGPL doesn't work. But if the goal is to prevent cloud provider abuse (e.g. Google, AWS, Azure, etc.), it works well enough.

> The other reason we don't want to use AGPL is that it can be quite aggressive in making you open source your own code if you want to embed our code in a proprietary application.

If you wanted to avoid that, you could grant an exception to be slightly more permissive for that purpose or to otherwise clarify the grant of use.

I know I personally would appreciate it if vendors who don't like the consequences of using ASL 2.0 would consider this option as an alternative.

And of course, selling full exceptions to AGPL in its entirety is a valid business model option.