[gwd]

> ...AGPL [is] basically a poison pill...

Bill Gates from the 1990's called, he wants his FUD back.

To be more specific: What arguments can be used to show that the AGPL is a "poison pill" in the SaaS space, which couldn't have been used by Microsoft back in the 90's and early 2000's to show that GPL was a "poison pill" in the distributed software space?

[wmf]

There's pretty widespread agreement that the GPL doesn't "infect" beyond the same process, but there's no such understanding about AGPL. COSS companies are exploiting that ambiguity to say "AGPL infects everything, pay us or die, and if you disagree we may sue you and we may win". And 90% of lawyers say "don't take the chance; just pay them".

Microsoft was consistently and openly opposed to open source back in the day. Now we have startups that are simultaneously claiming to be open source while using FUD to advance an essentially non-commercial interpretation of open source. It's not the same situation.