However, it's not a lonely path in this case, because they chose to govern it in a contributor-friendly manner: no contributor license agreements, commit privileges for non-RH developers (non-RH developers are the majority), cross-distribution collaboration, FOSDEM presence etc. In short: They managed to build a healthy community around the project.

You can see the differences in numbers: http://www.ohloh.net/p/systemd http://www.ohloh.net/p/upstart