In my view the people that recommend BSD/MIT or more permissive licenses tend to come from two camps: those that want to use the software themselves without having to share back anything or those that think that having a permissive license will get so many users that some benefit / coder sharing back will happen as a result.
I think the perceived drawback with AGPL is that you'll not have the community jump in as readily as with a more permissive license. And there is a lot of negative talk about the license as a result.
Google for example will talk about how AGPL is "more of a procedural issue than anything else" [1] whereas I believe that it is just in their interest to have permissive open source code that they can use and not share back anything. Very little of the Google infrastructure is shared, but there is no doubt that there is a lot of FOSS code in that infrastructure, or as a basis for the infrastructure, which obviously has moved on (and not been shared).
Google once banned AGPL projects from Google Code, but reversed that in Sept. 2010. Maybe the "threat" from AGPL in changing the culture around open licensing is now perceived so low that they aren't afraid of it anymore.
There are successful AGPL projects like MongoDB[2].
I think the perceived drawback with AGPL is that you'll not have the community jump in as readily as with a more permissive license. And there is a lot of negative talk about the license as a result.
Google for example will talk about how AGPL is "more of a procedural issue than anything else" [1] whereas I believe that it is just in their interest to have permissive open source code that they can use and not share back anything. Very little of the Google infrastructure is shared, but there is no doubt that there is a lot of FOSS code in that infrastructure, or as a basis for the infrastructure, which obviously has moved on (and not been shared).
Google once banned AGPL projects from Google Code, but reversed that in Sept. 2010. Maybe the "threat" from AGPL in changing the culture around open licensing is now perceived so low that they aren't afraid of it anymore.
There are successful AGPL projects like MongoDB[2].
[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/google_on_open_sourc... [2] http://www.mongodb.org/about/licensing/
Yes, I do work on a bunch of AGPL licensed software which is used by governments, companies and NGOs.