My dealings with AGPL software have been under the second interpretation. It was based on legal advice for our particular situations, and did not involve Singer

@adam_roderick Thanks! If I may ask, what was the form of “separation”? Eg Why was the code not considered then part of the resulting application / code?

Trying to recall details. We started thinking through a design of dynamic linking or splitting out the AGPL code into a different component. But we didn't need to. I believe it was because we were 1) not modifying the source (and if we were, that we were contributing the modifications back to the upstream repo) and 2) not distributing the application. It was SaaS, so we weren't shipping the software, just running it on our own web servers

Interesting. https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/5004 suggests that if whether you're hosting it or shipping it doesn't matter: if you modify the code, you must share it

The GNU General Public License permits making a modified version and letting the public access it on a server without ever releasing its source code to the public.

The GNU Affero General Public License is designed specifically to ensure that, in such cases, the modified source code becomes available to the community. It requires the operator of a network server to provide the source code of the modified version running there to the users of that server. Therefore, public use of a modified version, on a publicly accessible server, gives the public access to the source code of the modified version.

Yeah that is what I meant. If you don't modify the code, then there is a distinction in hosting vs shipping