Facebook has a terrible reputation, and if they can open source their model, it would transform their reputation at least among techies.
And that's undeniable, IMO -- llama.cpp, vicuna are some really prominent examples. People are running language models on Raspberry Pis and smartphones. Anyone who wants to tinker can.
Now, all the stuff that's built on top of LLaMa is currently encumbered, yes.
But all of that work can likely be transferred to an unencumbered base model pretty easily. The existence of the ecosystem around LLaMa makes it much more likely that someone will create an unencumbered base model. And it seems like that is already happening, for example, the Red Pajama folks are working on this.
The community has created their own replacement for LLaMA (Cerebras) with none of the encumberance. Even if LLaMA is deleted tomorrow, the LLaMA Leak will still be a moment when the direction dramatically shifted.
The "people" are not talking about the future of where this software is going. They're talking about a historical event, though it was recent enough that I remember what I ate for lunch that day.
Have you ever heard of PyTorch? React? Jest? Docusaurus?
If none of those changed their reputation among "techies" I doubt awesome contribution open source project X + 1 would.