[cleansy]

That's the free market at work I would guess. Zalando seems to see NLP research as a valuable asset so they pay for projects like this plus they open source it assumably because of employer branding. I don't see anything wrong with that.

[pploug]

Zalando Research is an internal team of researches, their work is primarily shared with the research community through publications: https://research.zalando.com/welcome/mission/publications/

In the case of Flair, research led to a reference implementation, which was then matured through internal use and open sourced to further mature it and get external feedback. While employer branding is a nice benefit, it is a positive side-effect, not the motivation in itself :)