And for my personal usage, Rails 8 has moved Redis functionality into the database by default, which works fine.
I love the BSD license, but now who says that AGPL is a cancer is making a big favor to the few huge companies that want to abuse the original dream that spawned modern and open software. Times changes, the best license to use change with times.
RMS has long expressed concerns about "Service as a Software Substitute" [1], and I think he hesitated to endorse the AGPL because it would conflict with his philosophy on the dangers of "Service as a Software Substitute".
Henry Poole should be given credit for raising the concern; Bradley M. Kuhn and Eben Moglen should be given the credit for advancing the license to address the concern.
It took a long time for the Free Software Foundation to accept Affero versions of the GPL under their stewardship with the release of AGPLv3.
So, perhaps he did understand before many people that services posed some challenges for his social movement. But it's my belief that he favored self-reliance and maximum "freedom" by running computer programs on hardware you own yourself as the remedy, rather than extending copyleft obligations to reach over the network.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
If you modify GPL code you are expected to open source the changes, AGPL adapts that to the networked world, if you modify AGPL code to serve something, you should open source those changes too, otherwise you're violating the original spirit of GPL which was designed in a time that was not as perpetually internet (and SaaS) driven as today.
If you want a true free license, BSD or MIT have you covered, but then you shouldn't expect corporations to give back.
A good example of what happens if companies don't give back is Linux VS the various BSD's. BSD is a lot more popular in appliances than you might otherwise believe but the popularity is starting to wane as Linux (despite GPL) has improved so much with companies giving back that the "free license" BSD is no longer being seen as good enough in some cases. People do not tend to give back to the BSD's.
[0]: https://blog.jamesbayley.com/2014/01/17/gpl-living-with-canc...
Good, you can think it is cancer and stay away from it. You don't like it, don't use it. It's like those bright colored poisonous frogs from the Amazon. That's better than some newly made up license that's different than anything else, and you have to wonder how it would hold up in practice.
Databases could always do what redis did. Redis doesn't bring functionality to the table, it brings speed. If database caching, pub/sub, and streams are good enough for your use case, there was never a reason to pay for an extra instance just to stand up redis.
If you don’t like it, don’t use AGPLv3 software. Those of us who do like it will keep writing AGPLv3 software.