> Semtech owns it;

I think they only own the hardware design, I think another company holds the patent?

> the phy has been reverse engineered and opensourced

The protocol is patented so I wonder if it infringes and could be sued? I ran into some issues reverse engineering propriety firmware in a past gig.

> everytime it comes up i have communicated using LoRa is not a good idea; it was designed for a different purpose all together

That's the entire point of this note!!!

I would agree, Semtech radios are everywhere, cheap, and easy to talk to, although with the rf95 I ran into some issues where a couple register numbers were swapped but the rf69 docs were correct. I sent them an email but never heard back lol