They call it a protocol but this is very much a startup/ICO, having raised nearly $5m in seed. Not that there is anything wrong with this, it seems like a very cool project. But it does seem to be very intentionally presenting itself as something that is closer to a not-for-profit a la Tor.
It is maybe worth noting that we had actually looked into whether we could be registered as a non-profit and still raise money by these means to build out our implementation and market it to the world, and that was simply not possible :/. We are, however, all deeply committed to open source, and are working on how to best ensure that this is enforced in the company's charter (such that even if there are any future changes, there will never be any fear).
All of our work is to be released under the AGPL3; and, while we have filed for a patent, we will be licensing the patent to the world in a manner similar to how Mozilla manages their patent portfolio. Brian Fox, who is in charge of making sure we have a successful and inclusive open source project, was the original developer of the bash shell, was for a while the maintainer of GNU emacs, and was the first employee of the Free Software Foundation (as Richard Stallman was a volunteer), and so is keenly aware of how important it is for technology to be available to everyone.
