If you're talking about free-as-in-freedom software, promoted by Richard Stallman and the FSF, then they have always been clear that Free software must not forbid commercial usage or require payment. Vendors are perfectly free to sell copies of Free software if they wish, but the license cannot forbid making copies and derivatives, even for commercial usage. See:
The principles predate modern SaaS by decades. You can see it in the wording of the FAQ you linked. It keeps using the word "distribute" - meaning giving people a copy of the software to put on their own computer - as if that were the only way of commercializing software. Which it pretty much was in the 1980s.
There has been some revision over time, but there's an argument to be made that small revisions are inadequate to keep up with the sea change in how computing works that's happened since the turn of the century. The elephant in the room here is that SaaS, and especially cloud computing, has pretty well undermined the practical foundation for how the Free Software model was supposed to work for people who are trying to make a living selling Free Software.
Doesn't the AGPL from nearly 20 years ago address SaaS? Given that basically every big tech company bans AGPL licensed software, it seems like it provides adequate protection.
Because everyone was always a user in the definition of free software! Because it's free as in free speech.. In the first bulletin where the definition was made, Stallman envisioned no restrictions on distribution and a user being a business was entirely unrelated to how compensation were to occur: https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull1.txt
In the very early days they were always the same, but differences between use and distribution emerged quickly.
For example, there are zero restrictions, duties, or obligations on using the software. But once you distribute changes (or in the AGPL case allow other people to use your changes), duties and obligations attach.
>In the very early days they were always the same, but differences between use and distribution emerged quickly.
I think those concerns existed at the time of the writing of the first bulletin, if you read how they were expecting to be compensated. See the part titled "So, how could programmers make a living?".
>For example, there are zero restrictions, duties, or obligations on using the software. But once you distribute changes (or in the AGPL case allow other people to use your changes), duties and obligations attach.
Yep, the duty and obligation to redistribute, as mentioned in the bulletin above - but without a single company being the sole arbiter or commercializer of the source, as defined in the Free Software Definition you mention elsewhere. Freely, as in free speech.. A quote from the original bulletin:
```
This means much more than just saving everyone the price of a license.
It means that much wasteful duplication of system programming effort
will be avoided. This effort can go instead into advancing the state
of the art.
Complete system sources will be available to everyone. As a result, a
user who needs changes in the system will always be free to make them
himself, or hire any available programmer or company to make them for
him. Users will no longer be at the mercy of one programmer or
company which owns the sources and is in sole position to make
changes.
```
In the SaaS era, freedom is impinged not because hyperscalers make money off of free software. That was always the intended goal, because it isn't freedom like free beer or simply 'non-commercial uses'. Freedom is impinged because modifications of the software aren't redistributed if distribution is only done over generated artifacts on a network. AGPL is specifically for networked software like this.
Unless you're implying that the GNU foundation, Richard Stallman, or the free software movement generally ever viewed even narrowly commercially restrictive licenses as free software. Which you can tell from the source documents and all others in this comment thread, that is obviously not the case.
The world changes, everything changes. Already 20 years ago Stallman saw that his original idea was abused (tivoization etc.), hence GPLv3. In the web era we have a completely different set of issues to deal with, and one of them is the killing of incentive by the big three public cloud providers.
Back in RMS days, he advocated, for example, a RedHat-style business model where you sell Free Software with services. But when AWS takes your project and releases it as their service, good luck competing with them. This is a very real problem.
I didn’t think the idea of creating free software was to monetize it. If you create a software as “free”, then anyone including hyper scalers can use it.
Put out a restricted license if you don’t want hyperscalers to offer it as a service. Although they have enough software engineering talent to use the old version to create and maintain a fork (e.g. valkey, opensearch, etc.).
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#selling