I mean, can't you say the same thing of Fedora? Podman, Systemd, Wayland and tons of other software was created by or sponsored by Red Hat because everything has to be done their way. Canonical tried the same, to much less success, with LXD, Upstart, Unity. But it's literally the same playbook.
Well, at least all of these efforts were and are open source.
Systemd was the second attempt at a new init system. The writing had been on the wall for a while for sysvinit, it just turned out that upstart wasn't really fixable. Later, when systemd started trying to unify more aspects of the distro, a lot of the conventions that were adopted didn't even come from Red Hats distros.
And while Wayland was started by a Red Hat employee on his own time, most of the development was done by Intel if I remember correctly.
It seems to me that you confuse "Red Hat is really good at building communities where everyone can contribute what they'd like" with "Red Hat forces what Red Hat wants onto everyone else". And yes, it helps that everything's open source and without a CLA.
It was still mostly driven by Red Hat people, most notably a guy who was terrible at taking feedback, and proposed "solutions" for security vulnerabilities which were bullshit ("just update systemd", as if you can just do that on any distro). For years systemd had pretty terrible downsides (you know how it deals with conflicting dependencies? randomness! Because that's what you need for an init system, random ordering), yet RH and the person in charge refused to listen.
That all the software RH made/sponsored had some advantage or another over alternatives doesn't change my initial point - Fedora, and RHEL, are full of RH alternatives to existing software. Yeah, Podman is better than Docker in some ways, but RH still removed user's choice by forcing their half baked "drop in replacement" that for multiple years couldn't do half of what the predecessor did. Nowadays Podman is decent, but it has been the forced default for how long now?
Why does it matter? They were trying to solve a real problem, and decided to dig themselves out of the hole that was upstart. I'm not even sure if Fedora or Arch adopted systemd first, but it was pretty close either way.
And Podman (which I admitted was at least partly not-invented-here) was a default but not "forced". I used Docker for years on CentOS 7, and only switched to Podman when it got better than the competition.
You mentioned exactly three cases, of which one was not even Red Hat, and that's being "full of RH alternatives to existing software"?
RHEL 8 and CentOS 8 (for the short life it had) came with Podman as default, with IIRC even aliases of docker==podman.
Fedora has always had Docker and on RHEL you could install it with community support only.
That's forcing an alternative, inferior in terms of features, tool. Canonical were publicly criticised for switching the Firefox apt release to a Snap for their easier maintenance.. Red Hat replacing Docker and telling everyone it' replaced by Podman, even if Podman could do 1/3 of what Docker could, is pretty similar.
And they did the same with the whole ecosystem - buildah is another example of them reinventing the wheel because they just had to. Kaniko exists and works well. Docker build has downsides. But Red Hat just had to build their own one too.
Also, Kaniko was made public in January 2018. Buildah had its first release in February 2018. It's unfortunate that both exist but so is life, they were developed concurrently even though Kaniko came first by a few weeks. Given the previous experience with Docker I am not surprised they chose to build something integrated with podman.
Not saying that you are not right, but for clarity, on Podman, and in lesser terms Systemd, there are valid points from RedHat - at least from my perspective as system administrator. I suggest you to make your own mind from this article[1].
> According to Walsh's presentation, the root cause of the conflict is that the Docker daemon is designed to take over a lot of the functions that systemd also performs for Linux. These include initialization, service activation, security, and logging. "In a lot of ways Docker wants to be systemd," he claimed. "It dreams of being systemd."
My key take - Docker's developers cared about moving forward fast and making dev's life easier, not about integrating into existing systems well (which probably alone is the reason why Docker was born - see how FreeBSD guys keep believing they have Jails and it's superior over Docker).
This is just someone who doesn't understand what or why Docker is. And when Docker was developed and released (2013), systemd was barely an init system, let alone the monster with 50 tentacles it is today.
> My key take - Docker's developers cared about moving forward fast and making dev's life easier, not about integrating into existing systems well (which probably alone is the reason why Docker was born - see how FreeBSD guys keep believing they have Jails and it's superior over Docker).
100% agreed. That's why it's useless to compare to systemd.
Hope it clarifies for you.
If it is the same playbook, Ubuntu is wildly outclassed here.