> Systemd was forced down our throats by Red Hat […]
That's a very emotional take on the whole thing. As I saw it, systemd happened and the Ubuntu developers eventually concluded "well, that's better than upstart, let's use that." Plenty of other distros made the same rational decisions. Meanwhile, the GNOME developers thought "great, people are converging around a modern init system, we can actually integrate with it now," and so they did.
Also, GNOME is not under Red Hat's control. They contribute a lot, but the leadership rarely has a majority of Red Hat employees. While a large number of contributors work there (of course they would - Red Hat is big!), the majority are - again - from elsewhere. I can think of plenty of recent features that people assume are Red Hat driven and I can assure you they definitely are not.
What your take is doing is discounting a very large number of peoples' wisdom, time, and effort, by claiming their contributions are made as helpless victims of some conspiracy or as evil supporters of it. Both of these ideas are harmful.
> Meanwhile, the GNOME developers thought "great, people are converging around a modern init system, we can actually integrate with it now," and so they did.
> plenty of recent features that people assume are Red Hat driven and I can assure you they definitely are not.
My claim is specifically that the people who added the hard dependency on systemd to GNOME were Red Hat employees. I'm not talking at all on who wrote or merged any other code in it.
That's a very emotional take on the whole thing. As I saw it, systemd happened and the Ubuntu developers eventually concluded "well, that's better than upstart, let's use that." Plenty of other distros made the same rational decisions. Meanwhile, the GNOME developers thought "great, people are converging around a modern init system, we can actually integrate with it now," and so they did.
Also, GNOME is not under Red Hat's control. They contribute a lot, but the leadership rarely has a majority of Red Hat employees. While a large number of contributors work there (of course they would - Red Hat is big!), the majority are - again - from elsewhere. I can think of plenty of recent features that people assume are Red Hat driven and I can assure you they definitely are not.
What your take is doing is discounting a very large number of peoples' wisdom, time, and effort, by claiming their contributions are made as helpless victims of some conspiracy or as evil supporters of it. Both of these ideas are harmful.