Thanks for having publiished these policies publicly! You gave a pretty clear summary of Google's motivations for banning AGPL on HN five and three years ago two of the previous times this came up, and having worked at Google 2011-2015 (including some interactions there with you), your public explanations of why from back then are extremely credible and rational given the logistics of what's easy and hard inside Google.
Of course. I appreciate the thoughts.
I try my best to be transparent and straightforward.
I actually do think it's reasonable to expect companies to re-evaluate every few years (at a minimum) because the world changes. At some point, the reasoning from X years ago will not make sense anymore.
One of the top rules of sane policy making is to write into the policy the conditions that should cause you to re-evaluate it, whether it's time, or change in evidence you relied on, or ...
You want people to understand your rationale and what might change your mind, otherwise you shouldn't expect them to go along with it.
Even though such a rationale exists in various emails, etc, I actually failed to do that in the resulting police here, unfortunately (the internal version is not any better in this respect). That one is on me and I think would be a more legitimate complaint here.
I don't think it would have changed yet (if anything, the AGPL has become more contentious as the economy has gone south), but that's just an at-a-glance view.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9956542
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13979443
Not that I'm surprised, as you've always been pretty forthright and honest. Thanks for continuing to be that way.