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Comment by sandGorgon | Hacker News Reader

Redhat funds almost every kernel developer there - including several core libraries and security.

Canonical does not spend so much on employing core developers and feeds mostly on upstream.

That in itself is not a problem...but your presumption is wrong. If you track the systemd inclusion process in Debian, you will find that it was not subverted but was a free and open fight. Systemd won on its perceived superiority by people much smarter than me.

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That's not quite it - it "won" because the Debian project only has the time and people to support one option, and they got railroaded.

That's not quite correct though: all of my Debian systems (jessie and stretch) are happily running with either sysvinit or openrc. Maybe there's a problem running Gnome without systemd, but I'm not using that anyway.

The only thing the TC decided is that daemons must be able to run under systemd -- which can be achieved by providing a (cross-init) sysv script, or a systemd service file.

I am not sure what is your definition of "won". There is only one option can be supported, and debian picked systemd over other options. It seems exactly fits the definition of "won".

Perhaps you should re-read your Thucydides, specifically the Melian Dialogue.

I'm making no defense of Canonical. I'm not an Ubuntu user. Redhat has been doing the right thing for years, with paid employees in prominent positions throughout the ecosystem, including the kernel, as you note. The problem is that they've taken all that goodwill and soft power and weaponized it to back GNOME against Unity.

Frankly i think they are more worried about Oracle than they are about Canonical.

While RH and Oracle has a long history of cooperation, Oracle now have their own distro thats a fork of RHEL.

This fork prompted RH to end some policies that made life easy for CentOS (who now happens to be sponsored by RH), regarding the packaging of various patches.

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