I've spent thousands of hours writing code which is under the BSD license. Nice try trying to make the argument about me.

(I've not put anything under even the dubious GPL license in over 15 years, and never will.)

Yes, a free software license must not require people to "contribute back", or anything of the sort.

For instance, a "free for non-commercial use" license is not free. Even the people who came up with the AGPL understand this, and go to great pains to explain it.

I understand the social problem that the AGPL is trying to combat, whereby visitors are held captive by saas applications over which they have no visibility or control.

The AGPL approach is to use the power of a non-free license against the problem which makes it a cure worse than disease, and repugnant to developers of truly free software.

It's almost certainly the case that the saas problem cannot be engaged via software licensing terms, if those terms are to amount to a free software license.

I don't have a better idea, either, but that doesn't change the fact that the AGPL is a non-free license which crosses over into governing use rather than just redistribution.

Also one issue is that the AGPL doesn't actually solve anything. Visitors having the source code to my evil saas platform doesn't solve the problem that they're locked to it. It doesn't solve the problem that I can change the code at any time and they cannot. Or that I can shut it down and wipe out their data, or share it with third parties. An AGPL conforming application also need not provide visitors with any way to export their data.

> Yes, a free software license must not require people to "contribute back", or anything of the sort.

This was in fact Stallman's original vision for Emacs.

https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch06.html

"It is distributed on a basis of communal sharing, which means that all improvements must be given back to me to be incorporated and distributed."

> Also one issue is that the AGPL doesn't actually solve anything. Visitors having the source code to my evil saas platform doesn't solve the problem that they're locked to it. It doesn't solve the problem that I can change the code at any time and they cannot. Or that I can shut it down and wipe out their data, or share it with third parties. An AGPL conforming application also need not provide visitors with any way to export their data.

Please enlight us about how the BSD license do it much better in this area. You first complain that AGPL is restrictive now complain that it should restrict even more? I agree with you, maybe it is time for another version of AGPL that includes data sovereignty. Let's make it more difficult for corporations to profit from FOSS free labor, not more easy.

> Please enlight us about how the BSD license do it much better in this area.

It doesn't, but it's a starkly free license which lets you do almost anything you want, short of plagiarism.

> should restrict even more

Nope; I'm explaining that it's ineffective against the key harms that may be perpetrated by SaaS. No license is; licensing is the wrong tool.