because having some capital class dictate the project is entirely antithetical to having the choice to contribute
Why?
the AI stuff is just being contributed by a few large companies who want it
Contributing something because you want it is how free software works.
DRM has absolutely nothing do to with this.
I will say directly that this model of governance is incompatible with the tenets of free software.
Which of the four freedoms does it fall short of?
What is a gif keyboard? What's wrong with copy and pasting from ~/Pictures/memes/?
(Yes, I realize my old is showing)
Everything.
Every programming language is an abstraction layer between the programmer and the machine that will run the code. But abstraction isn't free. Generally speaking, the higher the abstraction, the less efficient the program.
C++ optionally provides a much higher level of abstraction than pure C, which makes C++ much nicer to work with. But the trade off is that the program will struggle to run in resource constrained environments, where a program written in C would run just fine.
And to be clear, when I say "low-end hardware", I'm not talking about the atom-based netbook from 2008 you picked up for $15 at a yard sale. It will run C++ based programs just fine. I'm talking about 8- or 16-bit microcontrollers running at <100 MHz with a couple of hundred kB of RAM. Such machines are still common in many embedded applications, and they do not handle C++ applications gracefully.
I mean yeah, if you restrict yourself to the C part of C++ it can do everything C can. But then you're not getting any of the advantages of C++.
Once you start using things like classes and templates heavily, your program will quickly outgrow low-end hardware.
Repeating it doesn’t make it true. As long as the code is released under a FOSS license, the development model doesn’t matter.