Given that there are vendors that use FreeBSD for their appliances, they really don't want to have to send out techs to customers sites to fix things. So when the appliance makers choose hardware, they talk to component vendors about quality.
It's no surprise that you see commits from Intel and Chelsio employees in the FreeBSD logs: companies like Netflix, Isilon, NetApp, and Juniper partner with them to make sure things aren't buggy.
Given that there are vendors that use FreeBSD for their appliances, they really don't want to have to send out techs to customers sites to fix things. So when the appliance makers choose hardware, they talk to component vendors about quality.
It's no surprise that you see commits from Intel and Chelsio employees in the FreeBSD logs: companies like Netflix, Isilon, NetApp, and Juniper partner with them to make sure things aren't buggy.
These collaborations lead to point 3.