That’s simply not true, and you know it. Violating my privacy with a EULA is the issue there. It’s ok to put a EULA on software, but to pretend it’s still free software is the dishonest part.
Please don't take this as a personal dig because it's not meant that way, but this has such berating a girl for not being into you energy. You want something from them, and they just want you to go away, basically. You offer nothing they want, you want what they have.
Nah I mostly don’t use AGPL software because I consider it nonfree, the same way I don’t use any other source-available nonfree stuff.
The issue I have with it is the hypocrisy, not the code. They pretend that it’s free software but it’s just an anti-commercial use restriction EULA.
Anyway, most AGPL stuff is a 48 hour Claude rewrite away from having a free clone these days anyway. (In fact I have done just that several times recently, without even cloning/downloading the AGPL “upstream” repo, just with a vague mental model of what the db schema might be.)
AGPL gives you the same FSF freedoms as GPL or as any other free license, but it does come with an additional responsibility to the end users, not from the end users. AGPL is not in any way uniquely qualifiable as "a EULA". Every single software license, of course, requires you to agree to the license, hence the name. If you put nothing private in the code, AGPL will not impact your privacy. If anything, AGPL helps assure end users that their privacy is being respected.
The trigger happens when someone interacts with your code over a network, such as in the context of a SaaS product.
The line is when you try to profit off of someone else's work that it becomes "not free".
Also, not free simply means it needs to be in public.
This is so that any additive features that you construct can be taken back by the original maintainers. Thus, you have no competitive advantage.
If you wanted to, through marketing or similar, compete with them, you are more than welcome, but it would be with feature parity.
I'm not so sure this very fair compromise warrants your rhetoric.