I think all of the changes pretty much do apply generally, but for us it's easier to go ahead and publish publically to be able to pass these changes upstream,

I think all of the changes pretty much do apply generally, but for us it's easier to go ahead and publish publically to be able to pass these changes upstream, rather than pass them off privately and wait potentially a year or more to get them back in a public release. We want to be able to collaborate with Percona, Facebook, Google, MariaDB, etc., on some of the actual changes, to make things better for everyone. This is the first step towards that goal.