I'm sure the timing isn't accidental. Whole lot of kids out there begging their parents to replace that bricked console now..

The USPTO is not your enemy, congress is.

If your library is GPL-licensed, you're barring people from using it; from finding bugs and contributing patches. What open source is all about imho.

Over the last two years, I've contributed to three different open source projects on my employers time. Granted, just small stuff, but improvements none the less. Had these projects been GPL-licensed, we'd never consider them. I'm sure my company is by no means unique. Would Apple be using, and contributing to, FreeBSD if it was GPL'ed, for instance..?

In the end, open is always more competetive, and BSD/MIT/Apache/LGPL/+++ are more open than GPL. It's as simple as that.

C#? Really..?

According to tiobe, Java, as well as C++, beats C# and VB combined..

http://www.tiobe.com/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

The JVM is pretty much ubiquitous. It is also free, open and mature.

There's of course Java, but you also have a multitude of other languages taking advantage of the JVM, e.g. JRuby, Groovy and Jython. See a more complete list here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages

My personal favorite is Clojure; a modern lisp taking full advantage of the JVM and Java's extensive libraries.