Case Study: Maintaining the World’s Fastest Content Delivery Network at Netflix on FreeBSD Netflix is a global entertainment company that revolutionized the way people consume TV shows and movies with its streaming service. Headquartered in Los Gatos, California, Netflix has grown into one of the world's leading streaming platforms, boasting millions of subscribers in over
Because FreeBSD uses MIT license whereas GNU/Linux uses GPLv2. The difference between them is that with GPLv2 you have to share source code if you modify anything but in MIT license you can change anything you want and charge ppl and not share source code. That’s why a lot of corps like to use FreeBSD. I know that Netflix contributes to FreeBSD but I’m also sure they hide a lot of things.
White what you say is true, I feel like this has more to do with their engineers being better at or more comfortable with FreeBSD or something like that.
I’d say we don’t know unless we ask Netflix engineers but the comments about license look like a good one to me. Then there is in my opinion the “bloated” Linux versus the more clean BSD experience (I am a Linux user and I like to tinker with BSD sometimes). Maybe it is still true that BSD will not run on as much hardware as Linux does but have you ever compiled a custom kernel on BSD and compared it to compiling a custom kernel on Linux ? On BSD it is in comparison much easier and the documentation is usually really good.
I would like to know why they prefer FreeBSD to Linux.
Because FreeBSD uses MIT license whereas GNU/Linux uses GPLv2. The difference between them is that with GPLv2 you have to share source code if you modify anything but in MIT license you can change anything you want and charge ppl and not share source code. That’s why a lot of corps like to use FreeBSD. I know that Netflix contributes to FreeBSD but I’m also sure they hide a lot of things.
White what you say is true, I feel like this has more to do with their engineers being better at or more comfortable with FreeBSD or something like that.
I’d say we don’t know unless we ask Netflix engineers but the comments about license look like a good one to me. Then there is in my opinion the “bloated” Linux versus the more clean BSD experience (I am a Linux user and I like to tinker with BSD sometimes). Maybe it is still true that BSD will not run on as much hardware as Linux does but have you ever compiled a custom kernel on BSD and compared it to compiling a custom kernel on Linux ? On BSD it is in comparison much easier and the documentation is usually really good.
FreeBSD uses the BSD license: https://www.freebsd.org/internal/software-license/
Uhm. AFAIK, you only have to share code under the GPL if you distribute binaries outside your organisation.
If it stays in-house, there’s no distribution, thus no requirement to share the source.
I’m happy to be wrong, feel free to point out what I missed.
One reason is the network stack