A licensor cannot predict the future. When the GPL was written decades ago, nobody predicted that BigTech would start using it on their servers to offer it as "services", and claim that they didn't need to distribute the source code of the customisations they made because they were (technically) not distributing the software itself but only running it on their servers. Anyone who understood the intent and philosophy of the GPL license understood this as a bogus and unethical argument. But it was believed to be legally tenable (1). So the AGPL license was created to counter this move and preserve the original philosophy of the GPL that users of a software should have access to the source code.
(1) Though I don't know if this has been actually tested in court - courts in India have more freedom to broadly interpret social contracts like the GPL, unlike the US courts, and a positive outcome in favour of upholding the license even in such cases could be possible).
> Anyone who understood the intent and philosophy of the GPL license understood this as a bogus and unethical argument.
I disagree here. The idea, intent, philosophy is one (crucial) thing, the resulting practical artefact (here the license) is another. It works exactly as it was designed to work.
People/companies modifying GPL software for their own use (internal or external) without redistributing the software itself (so without requirement to redistribute the code) existed before SAAS grew on, only at the time, the small scale of this made it a bargain that was "interesting" only depending on one's capacity/hubris to maintain an internal fork on their own.
*aaS hugely tipped the scale, and the side effects, but the mechanics are the same.
And yes, that may not have been the original intent, and the AGPL is as valid a license as a reaction to provide a new tool more in line with the original intent, but that doesn't make the use of the existing GPL all within what it actually enables anyone to, invalid or unethical.
(but maybe only in a specific perspective of the framework of the original intent)
(1) Though I don't know if this has been actually tested in court - courts in India have more freedom to broadly interpret social contracts like the GPL, unlike the US courts, and a positive outcome in favour of upholding the license even in such cases could be possible).