[sniklaus]

It's complicated but the gist of it is that they are trying to commercialize it, yes. For what it is worth, you might be able to find it in commercial software once they were successful with their business endeavors.

2. Yes and there are two mechanism for handling seams. First, the inpainting which extends the point cloud and can provide a higher sample rate. Second, a postprocessing step that heuristically fills in any seams that may still be present despite inpainting.

4. The downside of it is that one needs a lot of resources in order to try all of these variants, which not everyone is lucky enough to have access to.