>patent pending

How is this a good thing? Any more info? Will it be under a copyleft-style patent license?

It is an effort against Intel and other "big players" who stole/make-big money on efforts of small PaX/grsecurity team, not only did Intel though make money on grsecurity, they actively broke copyright of grsecurity patches.

If true, this would be concerning. Do you have an example or other evidence?

I believe he's referring to a situation where Wind River Systems, an Intel subsidiary, was found distributing the grsecurity patches with Wind River Linux. On its own, that would be fine, but they also stated their Linux disto was "using grsecurity" throughout its brochures, etc.[1] This was taken as a misuse of the grsecurity trademark, since they were not paying for it, and I believe the grsec/Pax developers were at one point willing to go to court with Intel over this. But it's currently up in the air. Trademark/copyright claims in this area are a bit weird (it all depends on how WR's use of the trademark is interpreted), and Intel also has more money than God, so there you go.

The situation with Wind River is one of the reasons why the grsecurity stable patch is no longer publicly available, though, TBF, Wind River wasn't the only violator. They were more like the last straw, after they (grsecurity) had dealt with a bunch of other people using their work in the same way. And regardless of how the court claim would have gone -- honestly it's all a bit sad to me, given the only thing they've asked is you just don't call it grsecurity or whatever if you're not paying. Distros like Alpine and CopperheadOS have been doing just fine for a long time this way, it doesn't seem hard at all to play nice...

[1] I believe one of the Wind River employees was even ballsy enough to go onto the grsecurity forums and ask for technical help with part of the patches, and debugging them. As you can imagine, this did not go over very well, at all.