That's the story; he proposed new software and his employer liked the idea and paid him to develop that idea.

End of story.

People getting mad because they are "forced" to use a free software system? That's the fan-fiction from the peanut gallery.

> That's the story; he proposed new software and his employer liked the idea and paid him to develop that idea. End of story.

If this was the story the comments in this thread would have been very different.

Nah. The comments in this thread are just fan-fiction of people that are unhappy with the actual story.

So why's no-one mad at any other init or audio daemon authors? Poettering just had bad luck?

Because there is no other* that actually works properly to even get half as popular?

* there is now pipewire which will hopefully overtake pulseaudio though

There were popular audio daemons before PulseAudio took over, though. It's not like it entered a completely empty "market", if you will. Nobody was mad at the authors of those, even though in fact they did also suck. Nobody seems upset over Pipewire.

So I don't think you've found the reason.