As far as I can tell from Emad's discord and twitter discussion, the idea appears to be to make this a "research" release, and therefore the worse license.

At a later point the model will be renamed "StableIf", and released with a similar license to StableDiffusion.

Well, its a better license than SDXL is available under right now (which is “you can’t have it, but you can use it on StabilityAI’s hosted services”.)

Yeah Emad was clarifying this on the LAION discord the other day — plan is to have a better-licensed version out Eventually™, guess we'll see how long that takes.

for certain values of soon™ and eventually™

This is the dumb part about open-source models. Criminals, governments, and propaganda spreaders need not worry about the license; but legitimate users do.

This is the same problem with laws. The only people that follow them are legitimate users.

I hear this complaint often, especially in regards to gun control. Yes, there are a subset of people who do what they are going to do irrespective of laws. There is also a middle ground of people where the laws might curtail unwanted behavior. But the main purpose is it provides a basis for punishing unwanted behavior.

To make it concrete, one could argue that bank robbers rob banks even though it is illegal, so why have a law against it since law abiding people aren't going to rob banks. Does anyone really think we should remove such laws?