It is expected that you use the license with an Additional Use Grant. For example, Hashicorp says:
> You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided Your use does not include offering the Licensed Work to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis in order to compete with HashiCorp’s paid version(s) of the Licensed Work.
Or, for a revenue threshold:
> You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided that your use is solely for an application or system developed or operated by an entity (including its affiliates) with total annual gross revenues of less than $10,000,000 USD.
That is the whole point - you can define your own limits for commercial usage, while keeping the rest of the license text unchanged.
The AGPL's "viral" property inhibits competition without prohibiting it - companies are just scared of accidentally becoming liable to publish private software sources. As far as I know, that's the reason it is banned at Google, Apple and other major companies [1].
That didn't stop AWS though, which is why we now have SSPL and the BSL.
I think we're agreeing, but you seem to be spinning things:
1. BUSL does not allow production use. Additional Use Grant (optional) is necessary to allow this, and is typcially accompanied by a revenue limit, setting a trap for any business that attempts to use it by changing the rules as they become more successful.
2. The AGPL does allow production use, by default, forever, but requires you publish associated source code when providing the service.
Only one of these licenses bans production use, and that's the BUSL. It can be modified to allow it under certain circumstances, but your original statement, that BUSL allows production use and AGPL prohibits it, is exactly reversed.
> You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided Your use does not include offering the Licensed Work to third parties on a hosted or embedded basis in order to compete with HashiCorp’s paid version(s) of the Licensed Work.
Or, for a revenue threshold:
> You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided that your use is solely for an application or system developed or operated by an entity (including its affiliates) with total annual gross revenues of less than $10,000,000 USD.
That is the whole point - you can define your own limits for commercial usage, while keeping the rest of the license text unchanged.
The AGPL's "viral" property inhibits competition without prohibiting it - companies are just scared of accidentally becoming liable to publish private software sources. As far as I know, that's the reason it is banned at Google, Apple and other major companies [1].
That didn't stop AWS though, which is why we now have SSPL and the BSL.
[1] https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...