Not sure I understand your message. If you have a copyleft licence without a CLA, then the copyright is distributed between all the contributors, which makes it almost impossible to change the licence. And because it is copyleft, it means that the sources need to be distributed to the users.
So TooBigTech can build a service upon a copyleft project, but they have to distribute their changes, which means that the community can benefit from them. One example I learned about here is Grafana: AWS did not want to use their AGPL version so apparently they pay Grafana to get a commercial licence. That's of course possible only because Grafana own the copyright of the whole codebase. It wouldn't be possible with Linux, for instance, where nobody has the power to give a commercial licence and therefore it is GPLv2 for everybody.
It doesn't prevent TooBigTech from competing by serving the open source project, but that is more of an antitrust issue, I think.
Copyleft are sadly unclear legally which is why essentially no company uses copyleft licenses even if they should.
I mean the intend of apgl is exactly right, but in practice it means you can never ever use it in a company even if you really do not even want to change it or sell it or host it in isolation in any way.
That is really frustrating. Most internal licensing tools i have seen just literally blacklist any direct copyleft imports
Essentially yes. While weak copyleft would be fine for the use cases i have seen, the distinction and the licenses have yet to be tested in a EU court.
As a a consequence there are a numbers of legal options on the matter and as a consequence to that, it is a very hard no from most compliance deps i have seen
So TooBigTech can build a service upon a copyleft project, but they have to distribute their changes, which means that the community can benefit from them. One example I learned about here is Grafana: AWS did not want to use their AGPL version so apparently they pay Grafana to get a commercial licence. That's of course possible only because Grafana own the copyright of the whole codebase. It wouldn't be possible with Linux, for instance, where nobody has the power to give a commercial licence and therefore it is GPLv2 for everybody.
It doesn't prevent TooBigTech from competing by serving the open source project, but that is more of an antitrust issue, I think.