Your story is a good reminder that these license questions aren't just about some holy war or ideology campaign. These are real people with real problems. We need to be more sensitive about how to structure licenses such as the AGPL.
I find I don't want even to use the GPL at times. Why? Not because I want to give away free stuff to Google. Rather, because I don't want to force others to use the same license that I use. You can use MIT code from a GPL code base, for example. I want to be nice. If Google uses it without paying me, that's fine, too. Honestly I'd probably feel pretty proud of myself at that point.
Yes and no:
I currently work for the editor of iTop (an open source ITSM software).
Providing the software under an open source licence was a very early choice.
But what if a rogue concurrent decided to fork and hire engineers to provide it's own, better version of the soft while keeping it closed source?
The only open source licence providing protection that I'm aware of is the AGPL.
When you throw on the project your lifetime savings, it is quite a reassuring licence.
You're doing proprietary software! You want to control it, you want to be the only person able to make money off it, and you magnanimously allow others to have the source under terms forbidding them from threatening your monopolies.
I know we all have to eat; I'm not a zealot who thinks all software should be open either. But I don't see how developers exercising a monopoly in order to extract rent is software freedom. I just want some rectification of names.
I find I don't want even to use the GPL at times. Why? Not because I want to give away free stuff to Google. Rather, because I don't want to force others to use the same license that I use. You can use MIT code from a GPL code base, for example. I want to be nice. If Google uses it without paying me, that's fine, too. Honestly I'd probably feel pretty proud of myself at that point.