I'm not sure how trustworthy that post is. I haven't read it all, but there are lots of mistakes & misnomers that makes it hard to trust the rest.
> Stable Diffusion is an open source program
It's not a program, it's a model. It is also not open source, its license is "Creative ML OpenRAIL-M" which is "open-source like" or "permissive", but it does limit the usage of the model.
> has seen many variations, or forks, on the original code, all typically hosted on github, a code sharing platform. The most popular and arguably the most complex of these forks is automatic1111s fork
Automatic1111 is not maintaining a fork of the model/software but is providing a UI that uses the model rather. It was started from scratch from a user on 4chan and was taken by automatic1111 and put on GitHub, where they further continued working on the codebase. I think automatic1111 is the only SD UI that also has public codebase but is not licensed under a permissive license (automatic1111 retains the copyright to themselves)
These are things I know for sure are not true/misnomers. Which makes statements that I'm not 100% sure about, like:
> someone on 4chan used an exploit on github to extract the unique model of Stable Diffusion that NovelAI had developed and just released on their service
less likely to also be true. Also, if there was a 0day for GitHub, don't you think someone would have used it for something more interesting than leaking a image diffusion model and some associated code? It probably would also have been all over the news + announcements from GitHub, but I personally haven't come across any of them. But maybe I just missed it.
Overall, I'd take everything you read about all this drama with a pinch of salt, there is a lot of misunderstandings and misinformation about the whole thing, and that many people who "summarize" the whole thing seems to not be actual developers don't help either.
You're right, although I'd call them oversimplifications than outright fabrications. SD is not technically open source, and the Automatic1111 "fork" should not really be called a fork. The 4chan leak of NovelAI's model is also true (although I don't know the details of how exactly it was obtained), as I've downloaded and used it before. It does quite well with anime characters.
This post here from that thread [1]. But please, I just don't care about it anymore. I don't care what the truth is or who was lying about what, or which account is fake and which is real. Stable Diffusion has the worst tech community I've ever dealt with. I have never seen so many bullshitters, scammers and liars in one place. I've never seen a company piss away good will as fast as Stability AI. It's a top-to-bottom shit show.
This is the summary that should be read, the top post by ttopE.