If your mother tongue have gendered objects, sometimes you tend to use he/she unconsciously.. for example in French AI is feminine while in Arabic it’s masculine.

First they tried to take control of the DF subreddit (Source). Apparently it was solved on good terms.

Also, newer versions are much more controlled in term of what you can generate. No more NSFW allowed, no more "famous artists" based models. They was also rumors about new license terms (not sure if it did happen actually) that essentially provide them with legal power to force users to update to a newer version (as crazy as it sounds). There is a reason that the community is still using 1.5 version over the 2.0 version.

Honestly, the way I see it, Stability AI are not doing it with bad intentions (at least I hope), and are kind of forced to do that, as they are a legal entity and have to address all the threats of legislative actions regarding explicit sexual contents and living artists.

Of course no. Unless the research is done within a University context (or publicly funded), you won't have the model open source. SD is maybe the exception, and it seems to me like they regret releasing it and are now doing whatever they can to regain control.