I am the author of an implementation, although not the author of the file format itself. Although yes that it is still a fair point if you look at just the one blog post. However there are a series of them where I clearly explain the process and my involvement, so don't just look at the last.

I agree though the message would be better if it came from a third party. I was hoping this would happen, but it didn't look likely before the GA4GH conference (where both myself and MPEG were speaking), so I self published before that to ensure people were aware and could ask appropriate questions (to both myself and MPEG of course).

As for royalties, CRAM comes under the governance of the Global Alliance for Genomics & Health (https://www.ga4gh.org). They stated explicitly in the recent conference that their standards are royalty free (as far as is possible to tell) and promote collaboration on the formats / interfaces, competition on the implementation. For the record, we are unaware of any patents covering CRAM and we have filed none of our own, nor do we intend to for CRAM 4.