[skissane]

> Seems shortsighted. There are categories of software where even corporate drones shouldn't worry about AGPL... The license warrants caution. But not an outright ban.

The problem with a policy of "AGPL is allowed sometimes but not others" is who makes the judgement call on when it is appropriate and when it isn't? Can you trust the engineer implementing/consuming the component – and the average engineer isn't very familiar with licensing issues – to make that judgement call, especially when there could be significant legal and financial risks of getting it wrong? Probably not. So then the policy has to be "you can use AGPL but you have to ask for approval".

But, that's not too different from an AGPL ban – most bans have a process to ask for an exception. And, in practice, it de facto amounts to a ban, because most people will probably decide to just use some non-AGPL alternative instead of asking for formal approval (which probably has to go via legal and relatively senior management).