Yes, Canonical has been their main competitor on each point and it's possible the threat of Canonical is what sent them this direction in the first place [EDIT: or vice-versa—Ubuntu may have attempted to "own" parts of their system in response to Red Hat's moves to do the same, I'm not sure how exactly that timeline works out and all I have to go on is how both have behaved].

Canonical-steered alternatives to Systemd, Gnome, and Wayland, have been advanced (as you note: Mir, Unity, Upstart) with less political and/or technical savvy than Red Hat's efforts, and have all failed. Technically they all still exist, in some form, but they're de facto dead. Snap/FlatPack is another place they're butting heads, and I think it's fair to say Snap's not got a bright future, but I guess it's technically still in the running, so we'll have to call that one undecided.

How exactly would Red Hat pursue such strategy and compete with Canonical? Consider the fact that Red Hat leaves the copyright to the contributor in Red Hat's projects, while Canonical requires contributors to sign CLA to get patches included in Canonical's projects. Given this arrangement, Canonical both benefits from the contributions and also has extra rights over the code that everyone else doesn't have that gives them a competitive advantage.

What's that got to do with maneuvering for control of extremely-important parts of Linux? If anything, license/attribution fuckery would put you at a disadvantage in that kind of a game. Red Hat was playing for position, not material, in chess terms. Canonical may have held more rights to their competing software, but it doesn't matter a bit, because those projects are irrelevant now. They "own" more, perhaps, but they're in checkmate, so it doesn't matter. Who's looking to pay the best-positioned claimant to "upstart maintainer" for support? Practically nobody, and that's not a growing market.

If you're an enterprise, do you see Canonical/Ubuntu or Red Hat as the most-credible vendor to support Systemd, which both of them are running? Is there anyone else who might hold that title? The answer to those questions are the point of what Red Hat's done (or else they've accidentally achieved a pretty amazing coup through a series of maneuvers that led to that outcome simply by chance, which notion strikes me as unlikely).

What's important is making it extremely expensive to launch or re-position a competitor distro to Red Hat that actually ships substantially-different software than Red Hat does, at a level of polish & reliability that might let you compete with them. It leaves competing distros as Red Hat followers. Which, fine if some hobbyists pick that, what they care about is being perceived as the only credible claimant to the title of first-party vendor of Linux, in most contexts by enterprise.

> I think it's fair to say Snap's not got a bright future, but I guess it's technically still in the running, so we'll have to call that one undecided.

I'm surprised they haven't thrown in the towel yet at this point.

When I read HN, I never see anything positive about snap. And while this is arguably a fringe community, it is very highly correlated with the 1% of influencers to corporate decision makers.

Agreed, I think Canonical has been a lot worse in this respect than Red Hat. I think Red Hat's technical arguments have merit, and they do a pretty good job separating projects from the company so they are definitely not RPM distro-only.

I think you can really only use this assumption if you are talking about desktop Linux. Using the Ubuntu server version is mostly giving you Debian with more packages available (and all the benefit and downsides to that).

> Keeping Upstart after everyone else abandoned it...

False. Ubuntu switched to systemd as soon as its upstream (Debian) did.

See https://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316

Not false :)

Ubuntu offered Upstart starting in 6.10 (2006) through 15.04 (2015) after Debian's (admittedly very politicized) switch to systemd forced their hand

RHEL 6 (2010) included it for a single release before switching to systemd in RHEL 7 (2014) (though in balance, systemd was started by a Red Hat employee)

No other distros switched to it, and the ones that offered it as an option were very second-class citizens

So, they were one year after RHEL on switching to systemd to the default (and it was available as on option before that). The first LTS version of Ubuntu released after RHEL7 had systemd as the default. I wouldn't really say that they were using it "after everyone else abandoned it". I'd characterize it more as they developed an alternative init system that never really caught on.

Indeed. And notably, upstart came long before systemd, and with it Ubuntu was the first major (or any?) distro to solve the real problem of the non-parallelized boot speed issue for desktop users. Characterising it as "pivot and break core Linux functionality" is just outright misleading.