I wonder if Plausible discovered someone else selling software based on their code?
Although my guess is that it shouldn't matter much? Most people would want Hosted Analytics. So Open Source is only there for insurance.
One company was promoting a proprietary, privacy first alternative to GA, we checked it out and several features/elements looked pretty much exact replicas of Plausible.
The other was that we got approached to help someone build a direct competitor based on our self-hosted code. They were upfront that they didn't want to pay us and they didn't want to contribute back to the project. They did offer us publicity to their "tens of thousands" of customers!
For small or midsize companies AGPL + full copyright ownership is usually the optimal solution.
That is a fair point. May be Plausible should do that too.
This is a deliberate choice from companies that want to exploit open source without giving back to the ecosystem.
That's extremely their problem.