[AceJohnny2]

It's particularly interesting, because the rise of GNU is because it was an overall better set of tools than what Unix vendors shipped (HP-UX, IBM AIX, Sun OS, SGi Irix...).

The age of web changed all of that. Instead of being stuck on your computer with whatever tools you could obtain for it, you could now access centrally-maintained, quality webservices.

The FSF realized the freedom risk that centrally-maintained services posed, and created stuff like the AGPL to address it, but there just isn't as much leverage for that to take off like the GPL did.

[Jasper_]

Stallman's (and the FSF's) view on services is that it's like paying a plumber. The plumber isn't violating any of your freedoms by using non-free tools in their repair work, but it is unfortunate. This is a pragmatic view, because Stallman needed to grapple with continuing riding public transportation, even as they relied on non-free software, so an arbitrary line was drawn in the sand, one that barely made sense in the 80s and only continued to become more bizarre as computers became more and more networked.

This line has very bizarre consequences: FSF-supported hardware prefers closed-source firmware to be fused into ROM rather than upgradeble, the theory being that manufacturers shouldn't have more freedoms than the user. My favorite story was a laptop recommended by the FSF went from being "free" to "non-free" because an engineer found an undocumented protocol to upload new firmware to memory that the FSF thought was fused shut. These are the weird results that emerge when extrapolating extreme fundamentalist social policies far beyond their breaking point.

The FSF and Stallman do not care about the AGPL that much, they are far more worried about non-free software running on your own machine, like non-free JavaScript. Otherwise, Stallman couldn't ethically ride the T.