Except both of the projects you just linked too have CLAs, which they updated on switching to AGPLv3. Both use them as a way to offer dual-licensing, so they can charge companies for an AGPL-exception by selling them a proprietary-licensed version, which then supports the FOSS-development. They both were also only able to change to AGPL because of already existing CLAs. At least in Element's case though, they created a two-way commitment in their CLA:

Now, CLAs come in all shapes and sizes: some good and some bad. It’s critical to understand that our reason for requiring one here is to give us the right to sell AGPL exceptions: not to “do a Hashicorp” and switch to a non-FOSS licence in future. We’ve made this clear in the wording of the CLA (using a similar approach to Signal’s CLA) by committing to distributing contributions as FOSS under an OSI-approved licence – many thanks to those who gave feedback on the original announcement to suggest this. You can find the final CLA wording here, derived from the well-respected Apache Software Foundation CLA.

Here's the specific text from the CLA:

Element shall be entitled to make Your Contribution available under Element's proprietary software licence, provided that Element shall also make Your Contribution available under the terms of an OSl-approved open-source license.

I personally consider that a fairly reasonable term. Especially because they specified an OSI-approved license. Element are always going to be bound to that now. This is like the copyleft of contributor license agreements.

It makes just as much sense if you're selling it!

there’s certainly a camp in FOSS that considers “whatever you like including commercial activity” to be the one true valid version of “free software”

like… if someone wants to take an MIT project, add a bunch of extra features to it keeping some available only with payment, and contribute back bug fixes and some minor features etc, i wouldn’t necessarily say that’s harming the project and this is overall a good thing? it gets the original project more attention

like it’s perhaps a little unfair, but if the goal is quality and scope of the original project - or even broader of the goal is simply to have technology AVAILABLE even if it is with a few - then that goal has been met more with an MIT-like license than it would be with a copyleft license

Yep, that's the gist of it. In order to change the license from the GPL, they'd need the permission of all of the copyright holders who've contributed code under the GPL to the project. After a few months have passed, this basically makes it impossible (or at least extremely difficult) since at least one person (and likely many people) will say no.

AGPLv3 is not anti-business or anti-money. It's saying if you want to use the code in a closed source project you need to pay the copyright holder

The copyright holder is the original author, not a maintainer or someone who forked a project and renamed it.

That's why the #1 thing mentioned in copyleft licenses is you can't alter the copyright notice and declare yourself the original author

AGPLv3 is a good license to choose. All the other licenses are naive and do not combat closed source projects and the slave worker that keeps our projects unfunded

Copyleft means: "if you modify the program and share it, you also have to include the source code for your modifications."

The owner of the copyright (usually the developers or their employer) can still change the license later.

GitHub has long sought to discredit copyleft generally. Their various CEOs have often spoken loudly and negatively about copyleft, including their founder (and former CEO) devoting his OSCON keynote on attacking copyleft and the GPL. This trickled down from the top. We've personally observed various GitHub employees over the years arguing in many venues to convince projects to avoid copyleft; we've even seen a GitHub employee do this in a GitHub bug ticket directly.

You only need to know that corporations do not like copyleft to know it is good. The same goes with capitalists and wealth tax / inheritance tax.

So ironic how github is not open source and Github desktop is not on linux

Its a fork of gitea. It formed when gitea did something that the community didn't like. I don't remember the reasoning. But, I remember someone sending me a bunch of info about it in the past and it was enough for me to switch.

It worked from gitea when they went for profit or whatever

I recently migrated from Github to Codeberg and it was super easy. You can also backup your code automatically from Codeberg to Github just in case.

Ever since I read this Article I have been wanting to delete my GitHub account and migrate over to another platform. I would give a summary but I'm incapable of doing so.

If this info is outdated or misinformation then please let me know.

https://giveupgithub.org/

As someone who worked at a business that transitioned to AGPL from a more permissive license, this is exactly right. Our software was almost always used in a SaaS setting, and so GPL provided little to no protection.

To take it further, even under the AGPL, businesses can simply zip up their code and send it to the AGPL’ed software owner, so companies are free to be as hostile as possible (and some are) while staying within the legal framework of the license.

It seems there was a pre-existing agreement to use the GNU GPL with Forgejo, and it seems to me that the GNU AGPL is not compatible with the GNU GPL.

There is more discussion about that around https://codeberg.org/forgejo/discussions/issues/201

I'm assuming that there has been some resistance to using the GNU AGPL with Forgejo (it seems the discussions about licenses has been contentious), and the GNU GPL seems to have been discussed much more than the GNU AGPL. It was probably overwhelmingly likely that we would get Forgejo with the GNU GPL rather than the GNU AGPL. I would have preferred that the GNU AGPL was used instead, but I'm not going to worry about it much since I probably can't change this situation for the better.