No, it's always been the plan to open source Nitra. It's come from the team who built Nemerle, which is open source, and the team obviously wanted to continue in this manner. And JetBrains has a pretty good track record with open source - e.g. the IDEA platform that is IntelliJ's Community Edition is fully open source.
At any rate, I might have a look at this and see if a grammar for Delphi can be built... the state of tooling on that platform is quite frankly dire.