Laws exist ideally to limit freedoms whose exercise comes with externalities that end up reducing the freedom for others. These range from freedoms to cause harm to others (steal, assault, enslave), to freedoms to sell food without disclosing ingredients, to freedoms to run a business without transparently reporting financial information. The idea of greater freedoms depending on lesser restrictions is not novel.
> Lack of competition is what lets developer's exert power over users, and while copyleft licenses help with that, they're neither required nor sufficient to prevent abuse of power.
Copyleft/FLOSS alone is a necessary but insufficient measure; I wrote about other measures in a blog post [0].
[0]: https://seirdy.one/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication...
TLDR: open platforms/standards-driven and implementation-neutral development, implementation diversity, and simplicity are also necessary. Once all that is accomplished, you have a platform that prevents abuse of power: anyone can use any implementation they want, and implementations are simple enough for community members to fork and maintain. All of this prevents vendors from exerting power over users.
> At the same time, copyleft doesn't come free (ha), as developers who need to earn a living will choose to work on problems where they can actually extract some profit to compensate for their effort. Not everyone is keen to work for free, or work as much / as hard for free as they would if they could make a living off it. So yes you might get free-er software, but less of it.
From the article I linked:
> The key to making money with FLOSS is to make software a commoditized complement of other, more profitable services. [1]
[1]: https://www.gwern.net/Complement
> Examples of such services include selling support, customization, consulting, training, managed hosting, hardware, and certifications. Plenty of companies use this approach instead of building proprietary software: Red Hat, Collabora, System76, Purism, Canonical, SUSE, Hashicorp, Databricks, and Gradle are some names that come to mind.
> Managed hosting isn't a basket worth all your eggs if giants like AWS can do the same at a lower price. Being the developer can give an edge in areas like customization, support, and training; it doesn't offer as obvious an advantage when it comes to hosting.
In other words, developers should be paid for service rather than copies of software. AGPL makes it hard to sell copies of software, but doesn't stop you from offering any number of services. This makes sense, since labor is a scarce resource while copies of software require artificially-imposed scarcity to directly bring revenue.