I think in this situation it might have convinced Microsoft to contribute rather than fork... But then again, it's Microsoft. Also, they're well under their right to fork and keep the changes as long as the license stays the same, etc.
I think another important point might be that "free software" aims to protect the users of free software, not necessarily the profit-maximizing (I mean to use that phrase neutrally) ability of software developers.
In many cases, project maintainers would not want the changed code anyway because it does not align with their vision for how things should be done. Linus Torvalds and his subsystem maintainers, for example, do not want people to send them code dumps containing the hacks people have done to private Linux source trees. They want proper commits that are done well and have been modified to comply with any feedback that they provide.
What the project maintainer here wanted were collaborators who would work with him as a team (which is not much different than what most OSS developers what), but no license requires that and it is rare to get that.
AGPL may not have convinced Microsoft to collaborate.
It's not as much about the collaboration by the vendor per se, though users would likely prefer it, and are themselves able to collaborate on equal footing.
I also don't understand the cloud hosting argument, when we had a great whole era of Apache/PHP/MySQL stack based on exactly this idea of commercial hosting.
I think this isn’t a problem — not everyone has to contribute to any project! People sometimes struggle with the choice between GPL and MIT for similar reasons of popularity.
People who want the widest possible usage/corporate adoption can pick licenses that reflect that and embrace the tradeoff
This subthread started with the implication that people shouldn't be doing that. But you are right, that's exactly what most are doing.
It was particularly problematic for the FOSS companies because each of these players' plans was to resell the Big Three clouds and live off of the margin, so the instant that the cloud providers decided to just directly compete in the hosting space the original company physically couldn't compete on price.
The moral of the story is that if you're releasing cloud software as FOSS you can't plan your business around the idea that you'll be the only hoster.
