The AGPL makes sense for either dual licensed things (like MongoDB) or for projects that simply don't have the need for any direct revenue generation such as pe

The AGPL makes sense for either dual licensed things (like MongoDB) or for projects that simply don't have the need for any direct revenue generation such as people's side projects. AGPL seems to be to the cloud what GPL is to desktop. There are certainly those such as Stallman who are basically opposed to SaaS, though I'm not entirely sure where he draws the line between "in house software" , websites and SaaS. It does seem to me that asymptotically software with freer licenses "win". For example the Linux kernel. I would not be surprised if facebook was eventually replaced by something that existed under an AGPL license. However such a system would probably be powerful enough to be considered a platform in itself with it's own DSLs and therefor this would become where proprietary software lived. From a pragmatic standpoint though the increase in SaaS seems to have vastly increased the amount of open source stuff available (rails etc) and perhaps this trend will continue as higher abstraction levels of the stack become "freer".