AGPL is essentially the "corporate coward" license. They want to capture all of your private changes to basically get free (legally mandated, zero "community good will") development resources. Companies think it's "safer" than BSD or straight up GPL because lawyers feel "omgz, source codes, zero cost IP copies, instant competition!"
The next step after AGPL will probably be BrainGPL requiring you to publish all thoughts you have about any code you look at ever.
You could just pay for a license if you're that paranoid. It's remarkable to what extent people will complain about free not being "free enough". I assume you haven't contributed a line of code to the project, so it's a bit presumptuous to knock it.
> I assume you haven't contributed a line of code to the project, so it's a bit presumptuous to knock it.
It's not that simple. Even if you're a company that wants to use the software and contribute changes upstream, it's still a dumb idea to use AGPL software.
Because of the loose definition of what constitutes a derived work, modifying AGPL software (even if you put those modifications upstream) means you might have to open source your entire software stack. The AGPL is not like the LGPL, it doesn't contain any exceptions for linking against it in an overall product. Unless you have clear service boundaries, you are creating a derived work every time you use AGPL software in a service.
In my company, our lawyers outright forbid the use of AGPL software altogether for this reason. Even software that's only used internally. As _delirium mentioned above[1], that's not entirely an unwanted thing from the licenser's perspective: they typically do this so you'll buy their commercial license. But don't assume the only people who don't like AGPL are non-contributing freeloaders.
We submit tons of stuff upstream on a regular basis at my company, but we simply can't do it with AGPL software. Seeing any reference at all that our company (which has some of the deepest pockets in the planet) uses AGPL software anywhere in its stack will open ourselves up to lawsuits immediately. So we just don't touch it, ever.
The next step after AGPL will probably be BrainGPL requiring you to publish all thoughts you have about any code you look at ever.