The way I see it, making the project a nonprofit allows it to better compete with for-profit companies because of tax-advantages. It can also get donations. A for-profit corporation has the advantage of attracting investments from people hoping to make a profit, but I am quite sure that I would not be able to attract large sums of investment capital. That pretty much gives starting this program as a nonprofit the only logical choice.

Regarding your point about re-compensation, I don't think I cannot extract the value, it will just be difficult to pay myself an extraordinarily large sum of money all at once, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. If that ever did become a reality, then hypothetically I could create a for-profit branch of the organization that could partner up with the nonprofit branch in managing core revenue generating operations, thus allowing me to siphon income out of the nonprofit.