AGPL is not an open source license

AGPL makes it hard to have companies adopt your software https://blog.dgraph.io/post/relicensing-dgraph/

AGPL is not open source https://opensource.org/licenses (also new one of Dgraph isn't because of the clause)

If you do open source you should embrace it completely. If you open source other organizations can fork and compete with you, including the public cloud providers offering it as a service. This is not a bug, it is a feature. It reduces the lock-in risk for the users and ensures there will be vendors stepping up if the original project dies. If you try to get just the advantages you'll end up without a community.

RethinkDB did AGPL too but had manual exceptions when you asked for it https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/3347 open source should be about permissionless innovation. When the company went under it was only due to the dogged persistence of the awesome Dan Kohn that it got an open source license, otherwise existing users would have been locked it.

In order to monetize it makes sense to ask money for code, otherwise you're likely to depend on consulting or donations which is hard to scale. Don't try to ask money for all of your code by using a license most companies can't use and using dual license but clearly delineate open source and proprietary (open core).

BTW There is business source license that does timed releases https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/19/mysql-founder-tries-a-new-software-licensing-model/ You want to keep only a limited set of features proprietary since you want everyone to use the same version so bugs and improvements help everyone. This makes it hard to find features that are appropriate to make proprietary, releasing them later means you have to find new ones all the time.