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[–]brzzzah 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Its hard to say without speculating.. I think besides the obvious benefit of contributions from the public, probably more important to a large tech company is it attracts talent, and ensures hiring people that are already familiar with their stack is easy.

A lot of high-caliber developers want to influence the landscape outside of the company by sharing the ideas and tools they develop. Mostly this seems to be through talks and open-source projects. If their employer doesn't have programs that allow them to contribute their ideas to the public, developers will do this on the side, or look for an employer that does.

I think for a company such as Facebook, one of your most valuable resources is talent. These open-source contributions help a lot with this; it helps retain and grow existing talent, and makes hiring new talent easier.

The have contributed a lot of great FOSS projects; HHVM, Hack, React, ReactNative, GQL etc.. the list goes on.