I wanted to protect future potential commercial interests without stifling the spirit of open source collaboration and development.
I asked around for advice and eventually just chose GPL over AGPL because a lot of legal teams seemed allergic to AGPL and some companies even had a blanket ban on it.
I also thought that the greatest risk for my project was not an existing or future competitor: it was death by obscurity. To that end, I did not want to slow down adoption by choosing a license that screamed "$$$" or made somebody's legal team uncomfortable. In any case, if a big company wants to copy you, they will and can with the resources they can throw at it.
On the other hand, there are popular projects that do use AGPL (MongoDB) so it might not be that big of a deal in the real world :)
I wanted to protect future potential commercial interests without stifling the spirit of open source collaboration and development.
I asked around for advice and eventually just chose GPL over AGPL because a lot of legal teams seemed allergic to AGPL and some companies even had a blanket ban on it.
I also thought that the greatest risk for my project was not an existing or future competitor: it was death by obscurity. To that end, I did not want to slow down adoption by choosing a license that screamed "$$$" or made somebody's legal team uncomfortable. In any case, if a big company wants to copy you, they will and can with the resources they can throw at it.
On the other hand, there are popular projects that do use AGPL (MongoDB) so it might not be that big of a deal in the real world :)