Normally I'd like to try to understand what you have against AGPL (Opa is dual licence btw.) but given that half of your wording is around words like "retarded" and "stupid", I'm not sure whether you're really interested in real discussion?
From previous experience with AGPL licensed libraries and tools, I decided that it's best to avoid them without exception.
Basically, GPL and LGPL are the only acceptable licenses from the *GPL family of licenses when building websites. (GPL/LGPL/MIT/BSD for the server side software, LGPL/MIT/BSD for the JS libraries reaching the browsers)
I don't like the idea of being forced to license the app under the same license and release it to the public under AGPL if it's web based or running on the network.
I've come across such a company which demanded about 300 USD for a javascript library. Of course, we were told of this generous pricing via email. We rolled our own. That's when I started to hate AGPL with a passion and to dislike companies which use it.
Therefore, you can say that I don't want AGPL anywhere near any of the websites I'll work on or I'm currently working on and that I doubt that the companies which use this license have a good business model.
Opa has got weird looking syntax which can only lead to even nastier code. It also has HTML mixed with that weird looking syntax. The database is also something proprietary and weird. Normally, I can easily read code in a language I'm not used to. However, this was particularly bad.
All of those apps they show on the website are toy examples. Nothing big or popular was built with it. This makes me believe it's extremely difficult to get something done in this language and with the tools of opa.
Do you need to fix an issue? Perhaps add a new feature? I am ok with giving back changes. Since it's all written in (o)caml, it's more difficult to do that.
As for the part regarding the money they received, the people who gave them that amount of money are having a problem noticing how bad this opa language is. To me, it looks like they wanted to "gamble at this table" as well, just in case it turned out to be something more than a flop.
The things I'd give another chance somewhere else are: keeping the database & everything else in a single binary and some of its distributed architecture.
P.S.: I prefer to donate money to open source projects, rather than buy software to be used in the code of the sites / apps I work on.
I don't want to start (continue?) another static-vs-dynamic-typing war, but I feel like I need to add my 2 cents.
For me the biggest pragmatic gain from using static typing is that your programs contain less bugs right from the start -- simply because many types of errors are detected by the compiler based on type information. Just to clarify, I'm talking real strong, static typing like in Ocaml, Haskell and the likes and not Java-style typing, which is not very powerful and imposes the cost of adding type information on the developer, whereas in the aforementioned languages the type inference pretty much does away with this problem.
This having said, I'd suggest taking a look at the new programming language: Opa (http://opalang.org). It complies with most of the requests of the author of the article. It's compiled (#2) and statically typed (#1). It allows easy interfacing with JS, C and Ocaml (#3). First class XML elements: yup (#4); case sensitivity: check (#7) and JS is automatically generated from Opa sources (#8). I happen to be writing a blog about Opa (http://blog.opalang.org) and would be very interested to hear what you think about it.
