CineForm Goes Open Source

For distribution, yes. But for production and post-production that's fine.

Was the idea. CineForm was developed to avoid patents in 2001, by using technology that patents had already expired: 2-6 blockless wavelets, RLE and Huffman entropy encoding -- this is about that is used to make CineForm. Simplicity is what drove performance, wavelets over DCT is what helps in quality.The patent mind-field is in distribution codecs that strive for the lowest possible bit-rate, which was not a design goal for CineForm. Declaimer: I'm the author of the linked article.

Yes, but not an encoder, and that's the piece preventing it from being used to its potential. It's also nice when you no longer have to reverse-engineer the decoder. FFmpeg is one of my favorite things on earth, but minor differences between its implementations of closed-source codecs unfortunately prevent it from being a viable alternative in high-end post-production in many situations. ProRes encoding in FFmpeg for instance, although it certainly "works" as far as one can tell, still usually fails a few tests during the QC processes the bigger media companies use, and that generally means you can't use it, full-stop.