I'm on board with all the "facebook is evil" stuff and i don't use their product for various reasons, but their engineering department is really a good citizen of the internet and open source. Sponsoring Let's Encrypt is really in character for facebook, it's just the sort of thing they do.

Especially with the Stamos hire (not to say that there aren't plenty of previous FBers that shared his views, but he is particularly vocal on issues like this.)

This was my first thought too. It's not hard to imagine him pushing the idea of sponsoring a project like Let's Encrypt to other higher-ups in the company.

  Before the skeptical comments rush in

If the comment is in relation to the criticism to Mark's donations, I think this is a non sequitur... I believe people understand that in large orgs there are factions that operate with different motives. Also this is a good cause so perhaps it helps their image too. So people won't be too critical of it.

I often wonder whether the relationships between brand-less factions in (and across) organizations has more of an impact than the official PR-heavy moves made under the institutional brand.

Take, for example, the changes that have happened at Microsoft since Ballmer's departure. I have a hard time imagining the branching GitHub's Atom to make an open source "light IDE", deprecating IE, and Google's using TypeScript for Angular2 happening while Ballmer's faction was in power. Microsoft has the same name, but it's acting like a very different beast.

I'm not sure how one could observe these factions cut across institutions, but I'd be interested if anyone has any suggested readings.

  organizations has more of an impact than the official PR-heavy moves 
  made under the institutional brand

I believe heavy handed central planning at a large scale is destined to be inefficient. Sure there would be fragmentation but the system would be fluid. The chances of bad decisions taking the ship down will be reduced.

If you're referring to VS Code, it doesn't use Atom at all.

Oh, interesting. Not sure where I heard that... thank you for the correction!

No, I think it's related to Facebook being a PRISM company and having a deplorable privacy policy, and generally giving no shits about privacy or security. Also, Mark's internet.org wasn't going to support HTTPS.

Apparently this is a donation that has happened unlike Mark's donations. (sorry if I state the obvious but hopefully he doesn't divorce before those donations happen (knock on wood))

please help me understand why this comment is so unpopular?

Sorry, I'm is not registered user of that SN, but periodic getting spam emails about invitation. Hope that without any motives.

Thinking beware with gifts ...