"interacting with it remotely through a computer network" isn't "distributing", it's hosting. Companies providing software under Affero licenses love to play with words. That's fine. It remains a bad license for users. I choose not to use any software licensed under its terms.
From section 13: "Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software."
Your statement is incorrect: "You can even have and keep changes (unpublished) for you entire organization without having to contribute back. It is when you distribute it back to public that you have to license the changes under the same license."
Even *HOSTING* a private instance puts you under Affero. Even if the instance isn't public, if you so much as have a contractor remotely accessing an internal deployment of a customized Affero-licensed software then they can ask for this customization.
Here's from Leantime's own FAQ (https://leantime.io/pricing/): "We are GPL-2 and require code updates to be submitted back to the core code. We offer Enterprise licenses if you’d like to modify the code to use for company use."
Here's from Leantime's own FAQ (https://leantime.io/pricing/): "We are GPL-2 and require code updates to be submitted back to the core code. We offer Enterprise licenses if you’d like to modify the code to use for company use."
The pattern is effectively always the same. Many companies use this license to offer a free version while offering a "way out" by providing an "enterprise license". They get you hooked because it's open source. But as soon as you want to customize and keep the changes, they want to charge you.
It's a matter of personal choice. I choose NOT to use any Affero licensed software if I can help it.
I can't find the article anymore (and I've looked for it several times in the past) but someone was making the point that open source was essentially an economic phenomenon. Insofar as distribution costs went to zero with the advent of mass-access to the internet then it was inevitable that people would start sharing software. Obviously this takes nothing away from all those early contributors, but it is food for thought.
Mind you while Linux was taking off the BSDs were apparently busy in lawsuits. So, while the zeroing of distribution costs should've benefited them, it seems Linux was at the right place at the right time, minus the baggage.
Some friends told me they ran into Andrew Tannenbaum at Embedded World a few years ago and asked him if he still believed that Minix was better than Linux. Apparently he said yes.
Have a look at "Investing in Stocks, How to Win Big! Strategizing, Positioning, and Leveraging for Success" by Kishore Mishra. It's self-pub on Amazon. The title is truly horrendous, the text would benefit from an editor, the layout would benefit from professional typesetting, etc. But it's written by an EE. I started reading it a while ago and liked how he approached the explanation from the ground up. It spoke to my engineering mind. Unfortunately I had to set it aside and it's been on my shelf for a while. But I'm thinking of picking it up again.
I had discovered this author by reading another book he wrote entitled "Advanced Chip Design, Practical Examples in Verilog". Also self-pub and also suffering from lots of self-pub issues. But the essentials were more-or-less there.
I've successfully used SH3D to create plans for a 14'x24' workshop that a contractor then used to build it. A year later I used it to remodel 2 bedrooms with some funky closet arrangement and again gave the plans to a contractor to do the work.
It's got its quirks, but it's good enough to get a good idea of what things would look like. Most irritating is when its 3D viewer fails because of some random error as a separate window and has to be closed and reopened. Then again this was an older version. Maybe things got better since.
I've found that I can more easily get myself to get things done when I project myself into the future and remember the satisfaction of having done it. The projected nostalgia of a job well done turns out to be a powerful motivator for me.