The legal side is not an issue, at all. The main concern is the core developers seem to be content with just focusing on standardization for post formats without any room for other developers to add their own custom formats via codes from core.

When 3.1 gets released, you'd need to develop your own work-around for custom post formats. I don't understand the need to set standards from the top down, forcing the majority (users) to follow the minority's (core developers) configurations.

That isn't how WordPress works. Standardization for future proofing or portability is important (e.g. WordPress import), but maybe for post formats portability shouldn't be priority number one.

You can have a set of standard post formats and allow custom post format capability at the same time so my question is why can't we have both?