With the 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.
Deb Goodkin, the executive director of the FreeBSD Foundation, reached out to reaffirm that Netflix is good to the FreeBSD project. As laid out in the Netflix presentation, the network changes are either upstreamed or in the process of being reviewed for upstream acceptance. Netflix ends up upstreaming most of their changes/optimizations where it makes sense having those changes in the upstream code-base.