My statement here is less that the AGPL doesn't set out to do what it says on the tin (it does) but more that many people launching SaaS companies don't understand what the tin says. Many at least consider AGPL because they believe it "protects" them in some fashion from other cloud providers monetizing their IP.

The OP paradedb blog states for example:

> Future-Proof: Thanks to the copyleft provision, cloud vendors cannot easily resell our project without our consent. This gives us confidence in our ability to monetize without fear of predatory competition.

IANAL but my understanding of reading the various legal analyses of AGPL (which I've read several) is this part is not true: cloud vendors absolutely could resell their project without their consent, provided those cloud vendors don't modify the code. From an end user perspective and for an OSI OSS advocate those attributes are likely in your best short-term interest: they promote competition. But in the long-term, if the company launching an AGPL product believes it protects them from this, they're going to eventually find out what Mongo did: that it doesn't. And the result of that is that they'll either need to accept that there will be cloud vendors competing with them on the IP they created or relicense. Commercial interests/shareholders being as they are and many of these companies being VC-backed startups, the latter is frankly a more likely scenario.