Since Opencoin is a US company it will accept any government interference if it wants to keep it's investment, and that's a single point of failure for a distributed currency scheme.
It's a single point of failure for a non-distributed scheme, like pretty much every payment system out there. If we are successful, Ripple will be different.
As I've detailed in other posts, even if you publish the source there's no way for the network to fork if people don't like your newest changes; you will maintain complete control of both your ledger and any alternate ledgers for the foreseeable future.
I hope not. We don't want that kind of control. It doesn't benefit us in any way and it will decrease adoption. Our financial interest is in seeing the value of XRP go up and the primary way for us to achieve that is broad adoption of Ripple as a payment system.
Think about Satoshi and Bitcoin. His financial interest was in seeing the value of his Bitcoins go up as much as possible. Do you think he would have done better had he retained strict control over Bitcoin or tried to suppress altcoins? Or do you think he realized that broad adoption was the key and that required decentralization. The originators of Ripple were all Bitcoin people. These are things we fully appreciate. (And think about it. Would we even try to build trust with such a fundamental lie when trust is clearly essential to growing the network?)