This. I find distillation way more ethical than piracy. The U.S. already jumped the gun by making this stuff not copyrightable. We should of instead held these companies liable. It's not like the research they did in the process was for naught. They (U.S. AI companies) could of sourced legal material without stooping to the same lows that China and other nations are willing to go to. All in the name of a buck.
Anyways - I pay for z.ai, Opencode Go, Ollama Cloud. I love me some distilled models.