When opencoin releases its code this year(as per its employees), what prevents another competent group of individual(s) to clone this and distribute their own xrp in a open, transparent way and doesn't keep ridiculous amounts of xrp to themselves? Why do you think these transparent and competent cloners will fail if you think so?
My bet is that they have filed patents, once they have filed enough patents and feel comfortable with copyright/patent protection granted by those patents, they'll release the source code. As far as I know, you'll still need to pay royalties even when the code is made public -as long as the code is under copyright or patent protection. I think that is how they plan to prevent competition.