AGPL restricts developer freedom simply because they launched a webserver on the same machine. There is a legitimate logical argument that the AGPL is not free software.
Copt-left licenses are about preserving the users’ freedom. If we want to maximize developers’ freedom then the freest license is proprietary code where you own all the rights and then you can do anything you want and nobody can do anything about it.
No, the license that maximizes developer freedom is a permissive license, like Apache, MIT, BSD 3-clause etc. That lets you mix your code with either a proprietary or a copylefted project. Since a lot of Free Software is written by people who just want to solve a problem for themselves, they often just pick the permissive license.
Proprietary code is actually the most restrictive to both users and developers. That's because you can't legally mix proprietary code without a license at every step of the way. Any significantly large proprietary project becomes a mass of third-party dependencies with all sorts of license restrictions that your company is probably ignoring and breaking. Even if you follow all the tenants of those licenses, you don't own your code at the end. A Node-style mess of dependencies becomes ten times worse when each dependency has license restrictions attached to it.
In other forms of media, you generally don't see people try to license 30-50 different properties all at once for the same work, because that means nobody owns anything and the work will be really hard to market internationally. Software almost demands this sort of dependency soup, however, which creates all sorts of unique preservation problems. Whenever a large software project (or game engine) is discontinued, a lot of people wonder why the company who wrote it doesn't just release the code as Free for third parties to maintain. The answer is that in most cases, it's not their code to release.
> the license that maximizes developer freedom is a permissive license, like Apache, MIT, BSD 3-clause etc.
Depends on what open source philosophy you support - do you believe users should have the right to look at your source code, modify it, and share the modifications with others? In that case only an open source license like the GPL, that protects the USERS right meets this requirement.
Every developer is also a user of their product. Thus, protecting the rights of the USER, automatically protects the rights of the developer too, to further study, develop and customise their code further. On the other hand, permissive license can restrict developers, as others can close-source your open-source work.
If all you want is recognition and credit for your work, then permissive open source licenses are definitely better.
So you're using the world "developer" not as the one creating the project, but as the one retrieving it and modifying it. That's actually what licenses call "users", and copyleft licenses improve your liberties by maximizing the amount of projects that are Free.
What copyleft licenses prohibit is distributing software with less freedom than what you had when you received it, whether you modified it or not. But that's not a developer's issue, that's an issue for someone that hopes to gain something from restricting freedom.
