EndorphinRush

The article referencing this and Airbus is rather sensationalized and cuts off half the quote. This was said in reference to Airbus bribing foreign officials to buy from them. The full quote reads:

"When we have caught you at it, we haven’t said a word to the U.S. companies in the competition. Instead we go to the government you’re bribing and tell its officials that we don’t take kindly to such corruption. They often respond by giving the most meritorious bid (sometimes American, sometimes not) all or part of the contract. This upsets you, and sometimes creates recriminations between your bribers and your bribees, and this occasionally becomes a public scandal…"[5]

[5] R. James Woolsey, "Why We Spy on our Allies," Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2000.

The source unfortunately is locked behind a paywall so admittedly I don’t have the full context either.

I’m not a fan of Facebook. I don’t even have an account. But it would be unfair to say they haven’t come up with some truly innovative approaches to large scale infrastructure.

Also, to their credit they are huge supporters of open source. For example the Open Compute Project is still alive and well in large data halls. They are also still supporting the Telecom Infra Project which is responsible for OpenRAN as well as their Open DWDM hardware.

Does all of this work in their favor to support their own business? Absolutely. But that can also be said for every tech company in some form or fashion. But, they still open source it which is way more than a lot of other shops can say.