The systemd war is probably the best thing that could have happened to ensure widespread adoption of systemd. It allowed the supporters to lump anyone with any concerns or objections in with the frothing-at-the-mouth haters, and completely ignore them.

I don't hate systemd. I like what it's trying to do, and I don't hate the big-picture implementation either. But I, and many others, have a bunch of concerns around some specific details of the system, that got ignored and swept under the rug in the tide of vitriol between the two sides of the "war".

If the discussion had been more civil, maybe the more rational objections might have got heard, and we might have been able to pressure Lennart and Kay into not rolling their own, un-reviewed, crypto for journald[0]. We might have been able to avoid some of the feature-creep[1] that seems to have grown out of a NIH-mentality, and a better relationship with the community might have made the core developers more willing to play nicely with others[2][3].

0: http://lwn.net/Articles/512895/ 1: http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-reso... 2: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76935 3: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1116651