NFD is an open and free software package licensed under GPL 3.0 license and is the centerpiece of our commitment to making NDN's core technology open and free to all Internet users and developers. The main design goal of NFD is to support diverse experimentation of NDN technology. The design emphasizes modularity and extensibility to allow easy experiments with new protocol features, algorithms, new applications. We have not fully optimized the code for performance. The intention is that performance optimizations are one type of experiments that developers can conduct by trying out different data structures and different algorithms; over time, better implementations may emerge within the same design framework.

NFD is developed by a community effort. Although the first release was mostly done by the members of NSF-sponsored NDN project team, it already contains significant contributions from people outside the project team. We strongly encourage participation from all interested parties, since broader community support is key for NDN to succeed as a new Internet architecture.