| > I really do not believe that there is someone so powerful to make RedHat, Debian, SUSE and Canonical, to name a few, to harm themselves in one and the same, very specific way. Let's go through these one by one then. * RedHat could certainly have adopted it because they saw it as a way to take control of the development of a central piece of GNU/Linux software architecture. An init system is the one piece of software (other than a kernel) that you can't run two of at the same time on the same bare metal, so this is obviously a tempting piece of real estate to capture to provide a competitive advantage in a commoditised landscape. * SUSE didn't want to be seen to be left behind with "old fashioned" sysvinit, and didn't have the resources to invest in their own competing init system, especially after Canonical had already thrown their own resources at Upstart. Siding with the RPM distro over the DEB based one was also an obvious choice. * Debian had a contentious debate about which init system should be the default (and, in practice, after choosing systemd, the only) fully supported init system. The decision was placed in the hands of the Technical Committee, who were split down the middle between choosing systemd or Upstart. The tie was resolved by a single vote, that of the committee's chairman, Bdale Garbee: https://lwn.net/Articles/585363/ He is, no doubt, an honourable man, but he is also a cheerleader for HPE: https://www.linux.com/NEWS/LINUX-LEADER-BDALE-GARBEE-TOUTS-P... despite SUSE being HPE's preferred Linux distro: https://www.zdnet.com/article/sweet-suse-hpe-snags-itself-a-... * Canonical (that is, Ubuntu) went with systemd shortly after the Debian vote, once it became clear that single-handedly supporting Upstart was an unsustainable option for the company, especially as packages were starting to add dependencies on systemd: https://www.zdnet.com/article/after-linux-civil-war-ubuntu-t... * With all these top tier distros succumbing to systemd, more and more packages started to depend on it as the init system, to the point that it became all but impossible for another distro to ship packages that didn't depend on systemd in its base system. This is exactly the sort of slow creeping spread that systemd is notorious for, using the momentum gained from each small victory to help crush bigger and bigger targets, until it is unavoidable. The worst part, though, is the historical revisionism, and the suggestion that everyone just accepted systemd and abandoned all the software it replaces, based purely on the merits of systemd. Most people had to accept systemd whether they liked it or not. systemd is not a "suite of programs which play nice together", it is a suite of programs which only play nicely together, and which bully all the other programs into submission, despite systemd's technical flaws. |