I think the concerns about the licensing are a bit premature - honestly, this is currently a research project, not a practical replacement for existing image formats. The licensing is only one of several impediments to adoption.
- The format has no spec
- The format may change, rendering all previous images unreadable
- The format has no javascript implementation, and no way of running on old browsers.
- As far as I can tell, there hasn't been a patent search done to see if it violates other patents from other organizations. For example, this one: http://www.google.com/patents/US7982641
- No peer-reviewed paper published yet?
However that doesn't mean that we can't recognize the accomplishment - this looks like a very promising research result, and I hope the project continues! Good work Jon!