"The network has been initialized with a supply of 100 billion stellars. 5% will be used to fund operations of the nonprofit (its spending, including employee compensation, will be public), and the remaining 95% of the stellars will be distributed for free as quickly as we can manage."
IIRC Ripple's founders (including Jed) kept about 20% of XRP, and Ripple Labs kept about 25%, so only 5% is a lot better, but it's still a very centralized solution to distribution.
We hope that it'll end up being considerably more even than Bitcoin distribution. One note is that of the 5%, 2% is currently held by Stripe. We're going to auction off most of our Stellars, and return the proceeds to the Foundation.
We wish Stellar all the best and it's certainly a huge improvement on Ripple Labs, but we're also working on a (not directly competitive, but related) project http://hyperledger.com/ without any native currency or pre-allocation at all.
Hope we can integrate with Stellar as soon as possible.
IIRC Ripple's founders (including Jed) kept about 20% of XRP, and Ripple Labs kept about 25%, so only 5% is a lot better, but it's still a very centralized solution to distribution.
I do like that they're distributing 20% of the Stellars to BTC (and XRP) holders, though: https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Bitcoin_program