as an undergrad in the 90s I invested thousands of dollars of my own money to work on machine learning. Worth every penny, even if I had to miss out on some cool parties.
I'm not even sure what virtue you're trying to signal here. Just because someone used the limited funds they had available to obtain the software and educational resources they were interested in, they've exercised some sort of inappropriate privilege?
Isn't that the whole idea behind college? Spend money to learn cool stuff?
Ok, I'll spell it out. Presenting the idea that MuJoCo having a license fee rather than being free is better, not worse, or even that the difference doesn't matter because "well, I paid for stuff" is the inappropriate part of the privilege. Given a choice between "I can learn X but I need to spend significant money on it" and "I can learn X for free", with everything else equal arguing for the former is exclusionary.
Well, if you're working to pay your rent, bills, and food expenses, and you're only working part time (because you're a full time undergraduate student), you may not have a lot left over to pay for software licenses.
Working in undergrad and having thousands left over after paying for food and a place to sleep certainly can't be assumed to be. That's where my pay went.
But they can accept that the world is not geared towards amateur dabblers, and that a few hundreds of $ for a license (a license, meaning to legalize production usage, you can always copy from somewhere to "dabble") is nothing.
The CS world has certainly been geared towards the hobbyist budget for some time now. Would be good to keep it that way, even if it meant sacrificing a supposed 1% extra accuracy in the latest "top conference" (sure if their sponsors are the companies publishing huge models it won't happen even if it should).
the price was reasonable for a good piece of software, but for the way people want to do ML research now (launch tons of parallel jobs on lots of cloud machines) the price, and more importantly, the burden of managing licenses, was prohibitive.
There was a free license for individual users, with the non-free license applicable to those who were receiving financial support (i.e. academic / industry researchers, etc.). The individual license was very popular and heavily utilized.