At its core, the real value in something like Diaspora is its protocols. If you disagree with the license, or the language they chose, why not make your own implementation from scratch that can federate with it.

If it survives, I might do this... I think their approach is fine for rolling out a private enterprise FB or creating an alternative hosting solution, but I'd like to see an even more decentralized solution. Ruby isn't a good choice of language for mobile, or native compiled "IJW out of the box" deployable solutions.