[delayed]

check out ham radio WSPR for an indication of the sorts of things that can be done

WSPR is very different than LoRa. WSPR is usually used at HF, and has very low bandwidth. LoRa is used at UHF frequencies, and has very wide bandwidth, as it's a spread spectrum modulation scheme.

There's more differences but those are the ones relevant to this discussion.

Not super familiar with LoRa, can you explain what makes it properietary? Is it the protocol?

They've taken out a bunch of patents for instance:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160094269A1/en

That's right. Microsoft must have used Bing to see if the name was taken, and got no results, when they named their thing LoRA.

The added this line to their LoRA Github though: "(For the radio communication technique, see LoRa.)"

LoRa vs LoRA. The former is what the link is about which is some cool radio stuff.