Readit NewsAlso show me evidence of them "shopping around" code. I'll wait.
People want to understand their software as well as it's practically possible. It's not an uncommon preference; worse-is-better was quite successful for a reason. As systemd stands, it's an unauditable mess of tightly-coupled components built to handle any conceivable need. These features create new attack vectors: for instance, systemd-machined credential passing system, which can inject arbitrary files such as keys and configs into the guest, also runs on bare metal. And some are just running a musl system that can't even use systemd.
Some might look at the old SysV init scripts through rose-tinted glasses, but I don't think it represents the current state of the community. We have the modern OpenRC with parallel startup, dependency-based initialization, supervision, network management, and cgroups; dinit, which tries to imitate the 80% of systemd features that people use with 20% of its footprint; s6 with its supervision trees; runit that just works; and GNU Shepherd, which gives you an entire Scheme interpreter to configure your system.
Monocultures are bad because they eliminate competitive pressure for good design and create single points of failure that affect everyone. systemd was an excellent addition to the ecosystem in its day, but has become uncomfortably sticky: you can't just choose to replace systemd; you'll need to reimplement udevd, logind, D-Bus activation interfaces, and now userdb, all of which have their own subtle quirks you'll need to replicate. Look to the state of mdev or elogind and you'll see why it's not a sustainable compromise.
Systemd was chosen by distros and users across different communities because it solves hard problems better than the others. We can debate about why that is, but the maintainers of Systemd aren't running smear campaigns against other open source projects. Often systemd is the subject of such ire.
They chose to solve hard problems and people adopted it. It's not anything more sinister. It's definitely not an "un-auditable mess". It's written in well formatted C with structure, good tooling, and an open community. You can disagree with the ideology but that's open source for you.
Additionally and away from my point, I believe that Systemd won our because they chose to embrace some complexity to solve really hard problems. Let's not pretend that a modern "init" does only system initialisation by calling shell scripts and then disappearing.
I’ve been doing Linux a long time and my experience is that systemd is much more pleasant to work with than the brittle duct tape and shell script stuff which came before.
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No one wanted to support it, not just Red Hat.
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My completely oblique, binary logs disagree. It won because it solved problems companies with money needed solved. There is no indication that it succeeded on merit.