My co-founder and I have a concept for a web service solution that we would like to begin developing. We have not been involved in development or hands-on programming for about 5 years. Our first step was to align with a developer I know from my corporate past. Our young start-up is now faced with a difficult decision, which framework do we build our web service on? We are intending on building content management system for a niche market. Our developer is recommending drupal but I am worried about building on a GPL license as it would close the door on an acquisition. Does HN have any suggestions? I heard Ruby on Rails has scalability issues. Microsoft is inherently more expensive. I would love your thoughts and I appreciate your time.
It sounds to me like you're worrying about problems you don't have. You're talking scalability and acquisition before you have a single line of code, let alone any users.
Oh and BTW, I've been on Rails for about a year and it's been excellent. Support from the Ruby community (blogs, presence on Stack Overflow) has been excellent, and so many of the gems/plugins have been so good. Not to mention, Ruby is a <i></i>fun<i></i> language to program in (at least for me).
If you're not tech-minded, and the developer that you already have wants to use X, you should go with X. This increases the likelihood you have to spend big $$$ changing systems away from a GPL system so you can make even more $$$ from an acquisition.