> The thing that prevents them from contributing is the license that would require them to contribute?
Yes. Because the way it which it mandates upstreaming means that it creates a huge liability and unclear exactly what is in scope of the mandated contributing.
E.g. real lawyers looking at it have said that if you build a web app, and it uses mongodb (AGPL) to store some state, then you may need to opensource your web app.
It's not even clear if the AGPL software needs to be in the serving path. Maybe your billing pipeline uses mongodb, and now you have to opensource your frontend?
The counter argument from AGPL proponents I've seen is almost always "Good. They should need to opensource everything on their servers. I should be able to spin up exactly what they run, on my own servers".
Even a narrower interpretation that only in-scopes your patch to make mongodb work with your in-house SSO means you need to opensource things that you don't necessarily even own.
Again, the answer from proponents is "Good, all in-house SSO should die".
If you don't modify the AGPL software, you have no obligations under AGPL at all. The extra network provisions only trigger for modified versions of the software.
I would wager most companies don't modify their database software. Even those that do, don't let end users interact with that database, so should have no obligations either.
The AGPL and GPL in no way mandate upstreaming, they mandate downstreaming to end-users. It is only via a culture of valuing upstreaming and or the maintenance burden of non-upstreamed changes that upstreaming happens.
It's working OK, but honestly that may be because 1) most people don't care about licensing, even the difference between public domain, AGPL, BSD, or GPL, or frankly shareware, or even pirated; and 2) they're running from twitter so they have to go somewhere.
It may have been bit much to say "baby with bathwater", but to fix the analogy maybe I can say "Throw the baby out with the bathwater, but it's fine because you have another baby, and half as many babies ain't too bad. At least it's not zero.".