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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

I do miss them being one of the biggest FreeBSD contributors. For a long time in the late 90s / early 2000s Yahoo was to FreeBSD what Netflix is now (and maybe a bit more). They used to host a lot of the FreeBSD build/test infrastructure and employed several src committers and they contributed heavily to a LOT of work that has made FreeBSD a viable OS going forward.

For example, they contributed heavily to the SMPng project (which made FreeBSD into a modern, multi-theaded kernel with fine grained locking). They even hosted the kickoff meeting: https://people.freebsd.org/~fsmp/SMP/SMPmeeting.html They employed Peter Wemm, who did the majority of the work for the AMD64 (eg, x86-64) port. And lots that I'm forgetting about probably..

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>Yahoo was to FreeBSD what Netflix is now

Many of the Netflix engineers a decade ago, especially the ones that contribute to FreeBSD, are ex-Yahoo.

Yahoo was dying when Netflix was growing, and a couple of the best engineering leaders from Yahoo came over to Netflix and brought all the top talent with them, and they gave them the freedom to innovate.

I've been there, working on FreeBSD performance since 2015. I wouldn't say "many" of the early folks. From memory, I think it was more like 2. Granted, 2 of the earliest. More of the early folks were ex Level3.

That was in the openconnect team but we had a lot of ex-Yahoo throughout engineering. For example the entire observability team was ex-Yahoo when I got there in 2011.

What happened? Did they stop using FreeBSD? Did they continue to use it but jsut stop contributing?

Yes, we migrated over to Linux for a number of reasons, among them 1/higher developer mindshare, and 2/Linux had better SMP performance for the first decade or so vs. FreeBSD as we started to buy beefier multi-core and multi-socket servers.

I thought it was Marisa Meyer that forced the change?

No, this process began long before she joined the company.

Sigh. I often think an erosion of tech stack also brings erosion of company culture and value.

Having worked at both Yahoo and Amazon, I don't think that's necessarily true. Amazon has a strong culture that's reflected in our Leadership Principles and has survived multiple significant tech stack changes over its history. Yahoo was never quite so principled as much as it was quirky and fun.

Hadoop too

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