I actually found it somewhat less than gracious. I read it to say that the wrong decision has been made, but accepted - an attempt to gain political points for the next round.
If you have to say you're being gracious, you're probably not.
It's clear that he thought Upstart was a better choice. His opinion hasn't changed, but he accepts that the majority of people who voted on this thought differently, and accept their decision.
If you're convinced something is good/better, and you've argued that way for months, do you change your mind about all that when a committee or manager decides to go the other direction anyway?
From my perspective the fact that good people were clearly split suggests that either option would work perfectly well. I trust the new stewards of pid 1 will take that responsibility as seriously as the Upstart team has done, and be as pleasant to work with. And… onward.
Looks pretty gracious to me.
I'd guess that, given Canonical/Ubuntu has struck out on its own in various other respects (and the level of controversy that generates on forums like this one), there is a need to make clear to the broader community that they aren't doing that on this particular issue.
(Speaking as a naive desktop ubuntu user who wouldn't know systemd from upstart until they blow up in my face. Which, AFAICT, neither ever has.)
You're confusing grace with humility. There's no problem with people referring to their graciousness, as long as they remain courteous while doing so.
Anyway, 'big deal about being gracious'? Your second sentence contains more instances of the word than Shuttleworth's entire missive. The title mentions grace; the text says "we ran hard, we lost, we'll go with our upstream distro on this one, thanks everyone". The article is essentially a wake for Upstart, a near-10-year project initiated and championed by Canonical, and Shuttleworth is thanking everyone for their past work and work yet to come.
It seems very gracious to me. But if you're not convinced, compare it to Ian Jackson, who is seriously pushing for GNOME to be removed from Debian if it has dependencies on systemd:
I think that's the right choice. GNOME is leaving non-linux out in the cold. There are plenty of linux distributions that ship GNOME, but there's only one serious GNU/kFreeBSD distribution.
I use Debian on my laptop, and FreeBSD on my server, but I wouldn't touch GNU/kFreeBSD with a ten foot pole. FreeBSD kernel with GNU userland and SysV filesystem layout is the worst of both worlds.
I'd rather see the inverse: a Linux kernel with BSD userland, filesystem, and ports. But that doesn't fit with Debian's strengths as a package repository. Installing packages to different paths on different systems is not really feasible. Using ports means Debian has nothing to contribute, since it completely replaces the Debian package system.
On the other hand, swapping out just the kernel is a natural fit for their system. All they have is a hammer, so they found a nail. Unfortunately it doesn't result in a very appealing OS, since the kernel is not really the selling point of BSD. It works, but it's nothing special. The magic is in the BSD userland.
I like the solidity of BSD and I love ZFS, but the ports system always felt surprisingly flimsy (coming from Gentoo I was expecting it to be just like portage, but it's a lot more ad-hoc and breakable) and I never got on with the BSD userland - I mostly work with alias ls=gls, cp=gcp and so on. If I set up my server again it would probably run GNU/kFreeBSD.
"The doomsday scenario of choosing between (a) and (b) becomes less likely if we make it clear how bad it would be. We need to provide appropriate backpressure to encourage upstream decisions that support the continued freedom of our users."
In other words, Jackson is willing to drop GNOME from Debian to pressure GNOME developers into not making dependencies on systemd.
But his "doomsday scenario," where Debian has to drop support for all other inits or drop all support for GNOME, is a false dilemma. Debian can still support other init systems, for people who want them, while still letting GNOME depend on systemd if that's what's best for GNOME. Users who don't want systemd can run without a DE, or they can run a DE that doesn't require systemd. (GNOME isn't even the default DE for Jessie, that's Xfce.)
So yes, he wants to make it clear how bad it would be, but he's also the one who's pushing for making it bad. It's not like he's just warning us that someone else will make Debian choose between those two things, he's trying to make Debian choose between them.
Actually, now that I think about it, this announcement has rather serious implications for the current debate in Debian. Several members of the Technical Committee are proceeding under the assumption that the Upstart developers will continue to provide logind without systemd. If Ubuntu is moving to systemd, that work is a dead-end, and Debian is going to have to take over maintenance of that work if they want to use it to support multiple init systems.
The decision to make systemd the default in jessie has been made. The TC is still debating whether or not packages will be able to declare systemd as a dependency.
Ugh. While I agree with some of his concerns about the ever-expanding scope of systemd, all of what he has managed to do during this debate is paint himself as an immature, toxic person, between his call to remove the head of the Debian technical committee and his "ultimatum".
