(

caveat emptor;

I'm not a systemd fanboi, and this is not meant as an endorsement of systemd, and some of you will remember some of the scathing, loathing, diatribes I wrote against systemd )
I'm still not really sure what the "fear" of RHEL is? They are one of the original distro's iirc, circa 1993 or '94. I'm sure that most everyone has heard of CentOS? ("Community ENTerprise Operating System") It is (or was, or started out as) an exact clone of RHEL using their publicly posted source code, and aamof, RHEL actually dropped their legal actions against CentOS, and even have/had their own paid employees working with the CentOS devs.

The reason I mention CentOS is because it started out as an EXACT copy or clone of RHEL, resulting in CentOS getting sued by RHEL. They very quickly came to their senses! (CentOS used to have a blurb on their website about the then pending legal actions) This multi-billion dollar corp. as you refer to it, is now allowing it's own paid employees to work on AND support an exact clone of their original OS! How scary can that be? To me, this sort of makes moot all of the arguments that systemd is a '
monster in disguise', designed to take over the Linux world as we know it... (can you imagine the hell-fire that would rain down on anyone attempting to make an exact copy of M$ or Apple?)
Here's a quote from the CentOS website; "Since March 2004, CentOS Linux has been a community-supported distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by Red Hat."
Oh yeah, you mention Android! Guess what? It is the largest, and fastest growing Linux distro in the world now! Yes, Android is the "
largest Linux distro" in the world. Do you know what else? It does not use systemd! From what I read it never will. (at least any time soon)

The latest systemd 'Sid' .deb file has 623 files listed in it. The actual /lib/systemd/systemd file on my system is a whopping 1.4 Mb in size. Today's monster desktop systems and even ones from 10 years ago easily handle systemd. It is measurably faster than sysvinit-core. Yes it is bigger. The Linux Kernel is considered to be 'monolithic'. I'm not sure how you could classify systemd as being 'monolithic'. The last time I checked it contained less than 70 binaries and you can compile it according to your needs. In other words, the parts you don't need aren't used!
And finally, (whew)

sysemd is hosted at, wait for it, here it comes, YES, at freedesktop.org! No one 'owns' it. Not RHEL, not Lennart Poettering. I'm thinking it is a great thing that RHEL remembers their past and still contribute a helping hand to the 'at large' Linux community. To me it says they haven't forgotten where they came from. Not that they are trying to "take over the world"...
At the time of this posting, systemd, journald, udevd, and logind combined, are using less than 13 Mb of RAM. With a total of 16 Gb's of RAM, systemd is a 'speck of dust in the universe' kind of thing to me. I would think that any Linux box you had that had at least, say, 256 Mb of RAM, and an 850 Mb HDD would run splendidly with systemd. I personally can't imagine running a machine with those specs in today's world, with today's computing demands, but I suppose there are lots of user cases I'm not thinking about where such a machine would or could be utilized...
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