This is such a stupid argument. The 3 Es came from Microsoft which didn't write a lick of open-source code back then. All of Gnome and Systemd is open-source. If you're so worried about being extinguished, you're free to come up with a better alternative. It's been almost a decade so you'll forgive me for not holding my breath.

Interestingly enough Poettering works for Microsoft now.

Times change too. Microsoft does a ton of open source. They maintain an excellent immutable Linux distro. As always the true enemy is dogma and a cult-like adherence to it.

Look at how well forking worked for elogind. It's been a constant burden for Gentoo and they've been looking to replace it ever since. APIs are sticky, and they are chosen because they're common, not because they're good.

Gnome maintains an OS for developers and such: https://os.gnome.org/

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is basically a Gnome OS already. So is Ubuntu. Though both come in KDE flavour and a bunch of others too.

I don't see what's wrong with Red Hat spending development time for "only" one single desktop environment.