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Comment by javindo | Hacker News Reader

[s]I may have misinterpreted this, but to me it seems as though all this provides is two things: 1) Netflix get some technology for free from which they can profit and 2) Netflix get to boast about using free/open software.

I think instead of a page thanking FreeBSD for software, Netflix, alongside many other large companies who use free software, could make more of an effort to actually contribute to the software proportionally to their use of it.[/s]

I apologise, clearly I had misinterpreted it and was wrong!

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They do contribute money, and developers to FreeBSD. They send patches, they sponsor the FreeBSD Foundation directly, they sponsor developer conferences, and they work with companies like Intel and Supermicro and LSI to make FreeBSD more awesome. This is a page for their content delivery appliance package, and it's not really an appropriate place to discuss all the stuff that Netflix does for FreeBSD.

Page 18 of the pdf kev009 linked to in his post[1] lists Netflix's contributions to FreeBSD.

  • Camcontrol mods to download SATA firmware
  • IPv6 ref counting fixes
  • ixgbe interrupt mitigation, RX optimizations
  • Fixes for isci driver for firmware download
  • Collaboration with FF, Isilon on Unmapped I/O
  • VM/VFS Tuning: vfs.read_min

1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6949244

Netflix does contribute quite a bit:

https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors

Or search for "Sponsored by: Netflix" in the commit messages.

http://freshbsd.org/search?project=freebsd&q="Sponsored+by%3...

I thought it funny that NetBSD is a donor to the FreeBSD foundation.

It is pragmatic. NetBSD will grab keys bits from FreeBSD, and will want to periodically merge changes. If they don't commit their changes "upstream"... but really more "sidestream", they will have to re-merge their local changes each time too.

I'm sure Netflix is contributing to FreeBSD. From the link posted above it states:

>We've been working hard on stabilizing the FreeBSD IPv6 stack for production-level traffic, and I recommend that all users of IPv6 update to the latest patches in 9-stable and 8-stable. Contact me directly if you have questions about this.

Surely that work has gone back into FreeBSD and is not just for Netflix alone.

yes it has. they were the first very high traffic ipv6 freebsd service. they discussed this at eurobsdcon.

I presume you mean monetary contributions? Netflix of course will not have developers with OS expertise.

Edit: wow, I'm really getting reamed for this comment.

From the link:

"We will contribute changes we make as part of our project to the community through the FreeBSD committers on our team."

They could hire a FreeBSD hacker and let him/her code all day long on the OS.

They actually have several developers on staff and most of the work they are doing ends up getting committed back to head

They have done that, more than once.

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