Gnome and Wayland countered Ubuntu's attempts to "own" competitor projects in those areas (the current fight is Snap/Flatpack). Gnome, in particular, was important as a lever used to make it expensive for distros to avoid Systemd, forcing it into de facto standard status more quickly than it may have achieved on its own merits (if it ever would have—and maybe it would!), from which point they've started using Systemd to eat other system services & daemons, increasing their control over the platform and cementing their status as, effectively, the "first party" vendor for Linux itself—not literally the kernel, but enough of the system that you've got to go pretty far into here be dragons territory, by the standards of enterprise, at least, not to be using Red Hat-steered software in key parts of your system—so if you want a say in the direction of Linux, as you experience it, or priority bugfixes from the best-possible source, or to talk to experts who write that software for a living, for advice or training, you're short on options other than... Red Hat. Which is the whole point.

Gnome is a healthy non-profit foundation with the majority of its organizational capacity (and income) not associated with Red Hat.

Red Hat hasn't been dominant in Wayland for years. It's very much a community effort, including governance and maintainership.

systemd is currently mostly developed by employees of Microsoft, Meta and Suse, aside from I guess Frantisek.

Red Hat does a lot, and I'm sure they have thoughts about where they spend their money, but I don't think people really understand how decoupled these projects and communities are.

It's funny how people view GNOME/systemd as some sort of conspiracy rather than it just being what the people who contribute want to work on.

Corporate strategy isn't conspiracy. I think it's even weirder to think redhat would just provide resources in return of nothing at all, or that redhat employees won't be biased towards steering the ship according to their employers best interest.

Like I genuinely don't think Gnome or systemd or Fedora would just use a ubuntu/canonical-built core system even if it was superior in every way

And hey I'm not complaining, I use systemd (indirectly) and gnome almost everyday. I don't care where the software comes from, really, I'm just glad I can use it. But that doesn't mean we can't be aware of the power dynamics around it :)

What about Upstart?

It was significantly better than sysvinit and Debian, Fedora, RHEL6, OpenSUSE all adopted it. Even though it came out of Canonical.

It was replaced by Systemd because that did concurrency in the dependency management, which Upstart didn't, and was never designed to do, so was going to require a lot of rework to support.

> the current fight is Snap/Flatpack

I work with enterprise customers every day who use RHEL, it's free variants, and Ubuntu - I can promise that none of them give a single shit about Flatpak or Snap. They will never use either of them. Those tools are only relevant to Linux on the desktop - the small size of that market is exactly why both companies (mostly Canonical) have gotten away with being a nuisance on this front.

Flatpak is very relevant on the immutable OS space which is being pushed hard as the future. It is mostly an enterprise (server/vm) thing too.

I just don't see people caring about an immutable OS in the enterprise space. The central requirement is already addressed by containers, and all of the security and compliance stuff enterprises do is predicated on having a "normal" OS - even if an immutable deployment is technically more secure, that doesn't help you if your auditors can't understand whether it checks the requisite boxes.

Yeah. To me, this just seems like IBM feeling like their existing (corporate) sales funnel is big enough that the consequence of this (reducing OSS users based sales funnel) aren't going to meaningfully matter.

Or, at least they won't matter while the current decision makers are still at IBM. It could be a problem for future IBM leaders, who will probably just attempt to buy SuSE or Canonical or something at that point. ;)

GNOME was pretty instrumental in forcing systemd to becoming a GNU/Linux-wide standard though, by creating some dependencies there.

> This is the opposite approach of Canonical which has tried to push lots of NIH technologies to silo people to Ubuntu and continues to fail at it over and over again.

Agreed, Canonical is worse. The whole closed snap store (where only canonical can use it) is an obvious play on milking the commercial software market.

That doesn't mean that what RH is doing is great though.