Thing is, you can learn from their Open Source without supporting their cash cow product. Also, maybe the German startup ecosystem would be better off with Face

Thing is, you can learn from their Open Source without supporting their cash cow product. Also, maybe the German startup ecosystem would be better off with Facebook's engineering talent being spread out over 100 small start-ups (all of which would pay taxes) instead of bundled in one huge entity (which doesn't pay taxes). And if I remember correctly, "fairseq" (the foundation of Facebook's recent wav2vec2 ASR breakthrough) and the foundation of Microsoft Translator were both designed by PhDs at the University of Edinburgh. (EU Grant 688139 initially funded what became Microsoft Translator). I applaud Facebook and Microsoft for hiring promising PhDs and giving them the resources to succeed, but I'm not convinced that European countries are better off with these people working at FAANGs - as opposed to local competitors.