Hacker News Reader

I think your definition of NIH differs from mine, on all of those projects. Let's start with Upstart, how was that NIH?

NIH is a cynical name, it means you prefer IH. All this stuff is related to Canonical reinventing stuff, without most other distros adopting it.

Are you suggesting Canonical should have stuck with SysVinit and shouldn't have tried to make systems better?

No they are suggesting the possibility you intentionally excluded, which is to make systems better but by other means.

When Upstart was conceived and first shipped, what other option was there?

Upstart got some decent adoption, with both Debian, Fedora, and RHEL switching to it by default for a short time.

Its downfall was that it didn't offer a great deal of benefits and kept all the downsides of sysvinit. systemd was superior in every way.