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Comment by dmwilcox | Hacker News Reader

What I heard and I'm not sure how much truth is in it -- but it's fun gossip so enjoy -- is that upstart needed some work done, and Poettering went off for 6 months and came back with a replacement (instead of a fixed upstart). If anyone knows the full/real story of systemd origin I'd be curious

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jrb explained the origin story to me once in passing at a gnome meetup in SF irl ages ago. But the only part I recall is it involved Lennart and Kay collaborating on a new init system on their own... without rh even initiating the project. I got the impression that this was a sort of rogue effort from these guys.

Folks direct a lot of systemd hate at Lennart, but just take a look at the journald header[0]: uint8_t signature[8]; /* "LPKSHHRH" */

== Lennart Poettering, Kay Siver, Harald Hoyer, Red Hat

I don't know the details but I heard at some point Kay and Lennart had a falling out within the project. By the time I got involved in journald development @ CoreOS, neither Kay nor Harald were visibly participating anymore... It was kind of annoying, as it left just Lennart to review any journald PRs, who was obviously busy, but eventually got around to it. I think it's worth noting that despite being the person who receives all the systemd hate, Lennart didn't promptly abandon maintenance of the project after getting installed everywhere.

[0] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/v255/src/libsystemd/...

RHEL6 did use upstart, but when RH tried to submit patches/work with upstream like they do with most projects they ran into issues with Canonical's CLA and other submission policies. So when Poettering came back with systemd they went "what the hell" and switched to that.

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