Sudden insight this morning that while the GPL is activated upon distribution, the AGPL is activated upon execution (with any networked interaction involved in that execution).

While I don't think this is an impossible thing to manage, I do think it means that compliance is more difficult with the AGPL... if you are already distributing software, it's not generally hard to distribute source along those same channels. If you're just executing software and having an interaction with another network participant, you might not necessarily have a similar arrangement to do a distribution... you might not even really know what you're running. (That sounds like an odd statement, but "finding" the correct source to distribute in AGPL'ed applications is an unsolved problem.)

While I think this can be overcome with server->client interactions, with some difficulty, I'm still not sure that most client->server interactions, where the client is running AGPL'ed code, can be easily handled. For this reason, I've been avoiding using the AGPL for software which might be incorporated with client code. I find it worrying when compliance may become overly difficult.

I'd like to be wrong about these things!