As someone who would love to contribute: AGPL means nothing if I have to sign a CLA that gives you the ability to switch licenses on a whim. You will have much less contributors for this reason alone, while also scaring away customers.
If the investors eventually stop paying the bills (or if the set of people that want to contribute is larger than the set of people the investors will pay), then fork it. This seems like a win-win, in that developers win because they get Free tools, and in that developers win because the get paid well to develop open source software.
- I want this project to be a success (and open source) - To make it a success I need to live - To live I need to pay for food
Commercialization in OSS is pretty straight forward as there aren't many options: - Support, managed hosting, paid plugins/features, sponsors.
With the exception of Sponsors, all of these require a number of changes to code and infrastructure that should not be public and this would not be possible without a CLA.
Ergo: CLA -> OSS Developer gets to live.
Yes, it does open the door to license changes and that is a whole other story. But what it boils down to is that funding an OSS project without a CLA is basically impossible.
but then AGPL is not the problem, CLA is, right?