I'd say software doesn't always win out on it's merits, there's almost definitely some social aspects regarding what does and does not get adopted. I do agree the commercial interests probably played the largest role, though. I think beyond the initial knee-jerk one might have towards this it's pretty comprehensive and there's interesting points here that are at least worth exploring.
Aren’t those social aspects part of their merits? A big part of why systemd won widespread adoption was by stepping up – the number of people working on the others wasn’t enough to be more competitive. I lost track of the number of Upstart bugs we avoided by switching to systemd, and that had the backing of one of the most popular Linux distributions.
> Aren’t those social aspects part of their merits? A big part of why systemd won widespread adoption was by stepping up – the number of people working on the others wasn’t enough to be more competitive.
They had the people because they had the money. The debate about systemd is only partly technical; it's mostly a culture war about how Red Hat is hostilely taking over the free software ecosystem, and how that invokes memories of embrace/extend/extinguish.
Another factor I was thinking is that almost everything in systemd is there because someone saw a need, even if it’s a niche – things like mounts aren’t a big deal for many people but the people who had something which wasn’t well served before wanted something better in a new system. Trying to replace a core component will flush out a lot of those smaller communities.
