AGPL doesn't prevent anyone from taking your code wholesale and hosting the entire thing. They didn't make any changes so they don't have to contribute anything back per AGPL. OP can make any part that interacts with it, such as billing and infrastructure code, closed source as they are the copyright holder and thus do not have to abide by AGPL or any license themselves. If they make every contributor sign a CLA, then even better.
But that only stipulates that the third party has to make the code available if they've modified it.
This is fine if you expect people to want to modify the backend, but it won't stop people who only care about cloning the service.
Which is sort of the point, good software made available to as many people as possible as cheaply as possible, but it's not really protection against others who would monetize the software you wrote.
I am not an IP attorney but this is undecided territory: as I understand it your integrations may be considered modifications, and thus may be subject to the terms of the license, depending on the interpretation.
If Amazon can successfully do it such that other companies whose products they were hosting had to relicense to source available from AGPL, then, based on the strength of their lawyers, it is likely that those integrations are not actually needed to be released. And even if they were, it doesn't really matter, people don't use AWS for their source code.
I am not sure how to interpret what you have written. Are you suggesting Amazon operated and sold AGPL-licenses software, and thus made a licensed program available over the network, but did not comply with the terms of the license? I am not aware of any evidence of such.
Amazon repackaged MongoDB, an originally AGPL licensed work, and did indeed comply with AGPL, but that means nothing because they did not modify the source code at all, they merely packaged it up into a hosted service. Because they followed the terms of the license but were accused of "leeching off" of MongoDB, even though they clearly licensed it to be used as such, MongoDB then changed their license to a source available one. My point is that if Amazon's lawyers, which are likely better and stronger than most anyone here on HN's, approved such actions with regards to AGPL works, then it's very likely that they were within their rights to do so via the terms of AGPL without open sourcing their integrations too.
What evidence is there that they repackaged MongoDB? How did they "comply" with the AGPL? It seems like they reimplemented it which would be no AGPL licensed works are involved.
This sounds like a myth. There is no way AWS legal would allow providing access to an AGPL licensed work over the network.
So what? Amazon is perfectly content distributing the source code, because they don't actually modify it, only host it. That was the main issue that caused many companies to relicense to source available.
