Yeah...

I tried to make an open source radio system like LoRa before LoRa existed, but I mostly failed to deliver on my kickstarter. :-/

I did make a 915/868 MHz frequency hopping radio protocol that is open source, as well as ARM powered hardware to drive it, but it turns out everything I wanted to do was way more work than I realized.

Bummer that LoRa hardware is proprietary, but I suppose so was the cpu and radio chip I used. Would be nice to get some open source digital radio chips!

That sounds interesting. Could you please provide a link to the open source project?

Sure:

https://github.com/flutterwireless/FlutterWirelessLibrary

https://github.com/flutterwireless/FlutterHardware

I have lots of hardware I could share if anyone would pick it up in the Bay Area, and I can make all the IP CC0 or MIT licensed instead of copyleft it desired.

LoRa is.. But LoRaWAN is an open standard, governed by LoRa Alliance.

Using the LoRa PHY. Not much of an open standard at that point....

So, in the article, I saw the picture of a ‘base station’...where can I find more info about the towers (locations, hardware)?

Does a single company own/control all the towers?

Are you speaking about the gateway? If so you can have more info here:

https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/gateways/

These base stations (we call them gateways) are owned and operated by individuals, communities or companies. The gateways demodulate transmissions and forward them to The Things Network's public community network.

There are currently over 8000 of these gateways worldwide (see also the map on https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/map).

What is the incentive for a hobbyist to set up and maintain a gateway, given that the protocol is not open?

Most probably don't want to have a say in the protocol specifications, they just want to use the protocol and spectrum.

80211 has no public specifications neither. Those specifications are behind paywalls.

Lack of public (official) specifications is much less of a problem than patents. Closed specifications can be reverse-engineered, but patents impede even independent clean-room implementations.