Fabrice has contributed to opensource more than almost anybody here. Absolutely no shame if he prefer to keep the source closed this time.

"...of free and open source software."

Not everything you write has to be free and open source.

I would not be surprised if his intent is to first make money on his insanely hard and smart work and then make it open source later on. I think he has done something similar with another project of his - I just don't recall which one.

kqemu was originally closed source. Not sure why it was open sourced, competitive advantage went away?

Yeah, kqemu. As far as the reason, that definitely might be it. KVM killed the need for kqemu. May be Harald Welte and co will release a GPL implementation which will force Ballard to open source his. Evil genius :)

While not LTE, here's GSM stuff:

* http://openbsc.osmocom.org/trac/

* http://openbts.sourceforge.net/

Some related videos:

* Fuzzing GSM handsets - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGPOscdLPFQ

* Running your own GSM network - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_9hPRF5fzA

* OpenBSC - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWPom6JIsr4

Here's one building a satelite phone receiver/sniffer:

* http://gmr.osmocom.org/trac/

* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSW-V94uZZQ

Open Source GSM protocols (on handsets):

* http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/

Yes, it is a big shame that this is not open source.

I wonder how much he plans on making from this?

I hope he makes a shed-load from this. I wouldn't begrudge him any of it, given his contributions to the software community to date.

Why shouldn't he make money out of this?

Good developer != ready to work for peanuts.

Perhaps it is GPL license AND commercial software.