While I understand and hear his stated intent in the twitter post, corporate legal departments are going to look at the actual written license and say no.
I also hear your point that other more permissive code bases can be written to reimplement the spec but what a terrible waste of resources that would be. By going AGPL he's basically making all the work he did to implement it a throw-away effort that will need to be superseded by an MIT or BSD or Apache-licensed implementation. I get the intent of AGPL, he wants updates committed back to the codebase. The problem is that corporate legal departments that are fine with PR's to MIT projects won't let you even touch an AGPL project to begin with. As with so many things involving social contracts, force is not always the best way to achieve the ends one desires. If I'm using a project and I make a fix or improvement, I want it committed into the main release branch because that makes my life easier the next time I need to pull updates from master. A quick tally of license popularity trends over the past decade demonstrates enlightened self interest like this is far more effective at motivating developer behavior around PR's than the AGPL ever was, without adding any terms that cause legal departments to block adoption.
I also hear your point that other more permissive code bases can be written to reimplement the spec but what a terrible waste of resources that would be. By going AGPL he's basically making all the work he did to implement it a throw-away effort that will need to be superseded by an MIT or BSD or Apache-licensed implementation. I get the intent of AGPL, he wants updates committed back to the codebase. The problem is that corporate legal departments that are fine with PR's to MIT projects won't let you even touch an AGPL project to begin with. As with so many things involving social contracts, force is not always the best way to achieve the ends one desires. If I'm using a project and I make a fix or improvement, I want it committed into the main release branch because that makes my life easier the next time I need to pull updates from master. A quick tally of license popularity trends over the past decade demonstrates enlightened self interest like this is far more effective at motivating developer behavior around PR's than the AGPL ever was, without adding any terms that cause legal departments to block adoption.