[jwheare2]

IRCv3 is a working group consisting of many different IRC developers and operators http://ircv3.net/participation.html that produces specifications by consensus, and there is a longer term effort to propose a unified RFC that improves upon 2812/1459.

IRCCloud as a company is an active member of the working group. I'm not sure how we would be co-opting any standard, but we implement them, and yes, we do sell a service.

It's closed in the sense that we provide a proprietary API on top of IRC and you need to sign up to our service to enjoy any benefit from it. But it's open in the sense that you can connect to any open IRC server, and if you choose to no longer use our service, you can download your logs, pick up any other client and continue to use IRC without having to recreate your community from scratch.

How suspicious you should be of all the above is entirely up to you.