Expanding on a thought about AGPL adoption I mentioned at bkuhn's talk this morning..

Traditionally, web apps have been 2 pieces of software, the backend and the javascript frontend. But there is a trend to change this..

For example, the Haskell community is working on ways to make a web app that is a single haskell program, that is compiled to javascript for the frontend, and native code for the backend. There's a particularly strong motivation there because we want strong types throughout, to eg allow for type-safe communication between client and server.

Exemplar: https://github.com/valderman/haste-compiler/

So.. Now we have a web app that is one piece of software. Part of it is distributed in compiled form to each user. Therefore, if the software is GPLed, the source code is required to be distributed too. No need for the AGPL to force distribution of the backend's source code!

So, this might tend to increase freedom, the same way as AGPL adoption would, but without the buy-in. And it's a technical way to work toward the same goal; make better ways to do this in different languages.

(Still leaves GPL adoption problem of course.. All this Haskell stuff is mostly BSD, although I write AGPLed haskell.)