This is true. We had to change our license from AGPL to Apache to make sure enterprise adoption was frictionless because there’s often a blanket ban on AGPL.
Hmm, wonder if there's something we can take away from this. Let's say the latest major release is AGPL (or newer dominant copyleft) and the previous major release is more enterprise friendly licensed with those offering paid support handling the security and maintenance of them. This means that the community can continue to develop and use the latest and greatest. Not perfect but it might work in some cases.
Sounds like an interesting idea. How about taking it even further and say what you say above but then also provide the latest and greatest release also as a commercial version. Then companies who want the latest will pay for it and OS community gets the latest with AGPL, while companies who prefer MIT license get a version that works but is not the latest or greatest.
That would be much like paying for support, getting the latest and greatest earlier than those who don't pay for it.
I wondered about combining it with dual licensing, but I don't even know how people do that today. Say if a whole community contributed to an AGPL project and it has a dual commercial license, who controls and profits from it?
Maybe all (registered) contributors would have to sign agreement that they give rights to publish also with commercial license to the corporation or non-profit that is in charge of the distribution. Would they be willing to do so? Well maybe they should get a cut of the profits.
That gets complicated managing all the payments, but I can see a single company using this model for their own benefit. Build momentum with the (two) OS licenses and get some income from the commercial license.
What could make this an attractive simple-to-manage model is that there would still be just one product, with different time-based releases of it, provided with a different license.
No need to fix bugs in the older releases, they are fixed in later versions. And everybody gets the fixes eventually but those who pay (or agree to AGPL) get them sooner.
I would like to suggest that companies have such blanket bans precisely because they want to be able to take advantage of free software in this way without contributing back. If you really don't care if they do or don't, fine, use a permissive license. But I think it's becoming clear that people do care about contributions, and that's part of what copyleft licenses are for.