They just have to make it hard/risky/expensive to keep using things they've declared deprecated, or to avoid the software they're pushing & steering. Which they've done pretty damn effectively (again, if this were all somehow accidentally, holy shit, it shouldn't have been, because, wow, it's been a highly-successful-and-effective set of business maneuvers executed over a span of years)

Doesn't matter if some hobbyists still run Gentoo with openrc and X-Window with Windowmaker and all the classic interchangeable daemons and components that Systemd replaced (and with which it is incompatible)—it matters that any commercial competitor's only realist option, short of a massive and risky investment, is offering the same things Red Hat does, but with less influence on those projects. They want it to be expensive to build a competitor that's not a Red Hat knockoff—and if that's not what they wanted, well, somehow they took a whole bunch of steps over a span of years to make it happen anyway, by accident I suppose, but the outcome's the same.

> Doesn't matter if some hobbyists still run Gentoo with openrc and X-Window with Windowmaker and all the classic interchangeable daemons and components that Systemd replaced (and with which it is incompatible)

Don't forget alpine is also openrc and it is far more used by corporate tech than gentoo. Especially as a base for containers.

As ever, solidarity matters. The only way to get out of these embrace, extend, extinguish cycles is to form independent organizations that are never beholden to a single company or even a small handful. Individuals can't stand up to the efforts of teams of company-paid developers just by contributing their free time. But it's very hard to create such an organization without the companies immediately recognizing the need to stuff as many of their proxies into said org to gain influence, and that's a difficult thing to counter. As an ecosystem, we need to contend not only with whether a particular thing like systemd works well or solves a problem but also whether it has predatory intentions. This is simply what the incentives lead to unless the community has a strong voice to counter such attempts. And in this day and age, that also includes dealing with all the submarine articles and other consent manufacturing that are well within the budget of any large company to try to fake organic community discourse.