For most of its history, networking has been a standards-first, protocol-governed domain. From the OSI model to the TCP/IP stack, progress was measured in working groups and RFCs, not GitHub commits. But that is changing fast. Projects like eBPF and Cilium, along with the architectural demands of Kubernetes, are moving networking from a specification-bound world into a software-driven, open source ecosystem. What happened to servers, developer tooling, and CI/CD pipelines is now happening to the network layer.

The open source future has arrived, and it is finally catching up to the packet path.