[7] In 2000, while developing an e-learning and e-service business model, Henry Poole met with Richard Stallman in Amsterdam and discussed the issue of the GPLv2 license not requiring Web application providers to share source code with the users interacting with their software over a network.

At that time, Poole contacted Bradley M. Kuhn and Eben Moglen of the Free Software Foundation to get advice on a new license that would resolve this matter in GPLv2.

[8] Moglen and Kuhn wrote the text of the proposed new section 2(d), and provided it to Poole, who then requested and received permission from the FSF to publish a derivative of GPLv2 for this purpose.

In the Free Software Foundation's judgment, the added requirement in section 2(d) of Affero GPL v1 made it incompatible with the otherwise nearly identical GPLv2.

Stet was the first software system known to be released under the GNU AGPL, on November 21, 2007,[8] and is the only known program to be used mainly for the production of its own license.

Flask developer Armin Ronacher noted in 2013 that the GNU AGPL is a "terrible success, especially among the startup community" as a "vehicle for dual commercial licensing", and gave HumHub, MongoDB, Odoo, RethinkDB, Shinken, Slic3r, SugarCRM, and WURFL as examples.