My usual reaction to anything Facebook releases is "yawn, they released yet another model that is practically useless because it's released under a non-commercial license", but I'm pleasantly surprised that this one seems to be actually liberally licensed! Hopefully this continues into the future.
I have never, ever seen a convincing business case for their doing so, however.
Not your opinion. A compelling business case.
Again, I would like to agree with your thinking. I just don't think the real world backs it up.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
In particular, open source software prevents people from getting locked into any of the AWS, Linux, iOS, or Android ecosystems. All of those are popular software development ecosystems that Microsoft does not own or influence very much.
The company who had a huge impact in fake news, discrimination, death of people, scams and scams, etc....
Facebook is cancer, the research is blood diamonds.
It's funny, back in the 90s I disliked Microsoft and thought they were inherently culturally opposed to open source. But big corporations really just follow their business incentives when it comes to open source.
It's not like Meta "loves to be open". But they would hate a world where all the powerful AI development happened on one of the big clouds. Imagine if every researchers used some closed-source API from Google or Azure or AWS. Meta would try to hire some AI people, and they'd be like, ugh if we take the job we have to use this weird Facebook-specific thing. (<cough>Flow</cough>)
So, supporting PyTorch and providing open source models is just a good business strategy for Meta. I'm glad to see it.