Netflix Is An Example Of A Great Open-Source Corporate Patron To FreeBSD

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Netflix Is An Example Of A Great Open-Source Corporate Patron To FreeBSD

With yesterday's article about the NUMA improvements to FreeBSD's network stack made by Netflix in their quest to serve 200Gb/s encrypted video content per server, in no time the forum comments were quick to theorize whether those changes would work their way back upstream to all FreeBSD users or due to the BSD license would be held as a guarded secret by the company. Fortunately, Netflix continues to impress when it comes to their open-source contributions...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Netflix-FreeBSD-Contributions

[slacka]

So this is my excuse to upgrade to Netflix Premium. Thanks Michael

[jrdoane]

They have a lot of open source projects.

https://github.com/Netflix

[TruthPropeller]

I will never use or endorse restrictive open-source licenses such as GPL in any of my projects. I'd rather stick to licenses that offer REAL freedom, such as MIT or BSD-3.

[andyprough]

Too bad they are crowding the interwebs with DRM-restricted material. And more than likely lobbying Congress and the FCC for ever more restrictive DRM laws and regulations. Releasing little bits of performance enhancing code and throwing around a few thousand bucks doesn't make up for a lot of other damaging aspects of their particular industry.

[Space Heater]

Using freshbsd you can see all commits from Netflix to FreeBSD. For example here's the list of commits to FreeBSD's -HEAD branch by Netflix. It's probably not 100% accurate, but it lists around 1,300 commits.

[Volta]

I will never use or endorse restrictive open-source licenses such as GPL in any of my projects. I'd rather stick to licenses that offer REAL freedom, such as MIT or BSD-3.

If you want to be proprietary whore you're FREE to do so. I will never use stupid licenses like BSD which allow to steal the code from developers and aid competition. BSD is a leech license. Linux, proprietary systems can take what they want from BSD and BSD reaction is like: oh, I'm glad you found this useful. I'm your servant and I don't demand anything.

[donbastiano]

And related also to the Ubuntu raspeberry pi4 news, it will be nice if they work to have netflix easily running in full hd with hw decoding on the raspeberry pi4... And also on Firefox on pc... I discovered only recently that by default it is using a 720p and I have to install an extension to enable the full hd.

[mrugiero]

If you want to be proprietary whore you're FREE to do so. I will never use stupid licenses like BSD which allow to steal the code from developers and aid competition. BSD is a leech license. Linux, proprietary systems can take what they want from BSD and BSD reaction is like: oh, I'm glad you found this useful. I'm your servant and I don't demand anything.

There are many valid criticisms to liberal licenses, but "stealing code from developers" is not one of them.
They give away their code with a liberal license, they're fully aware derivatives may not be released, and choose to give users the freedom to decide.
Stealing code would be using a GPL project as a base and then not releasing the modified code, because the developers decided that was the condition to use and it was not respected.

[timofonic]

Can similar improvements be made to Linux?

Are there a comparison of the FreeBSD optimizations against Linux and other operating systems?

What about doing relevant and equivalent networking benchmarks?