The problem with systemd/Red Hat conspiracy theories: Red Hat does not own systemd

Source

Getting really tired of the 'systemd is Red Hat's plot to...(anything you like here)' meme. Look, folks. Here is the canonical location for systemd source, the fount of the project. You will note that it is on freedesktop.org - not a location owned by Red Hat. Let's look at a core systemd file. What does the header say?

"This file is part of systemd. Copyright 2010 Lennart Poettering Copyright 2013 Marc-Antoine Perennou"

Do you see "Red Hat" there? No, you do not. Let's compare with Upstart. Well, it lives here. launchpad.net is a domain owned by Canonical. Here's a core upstart file. What does the header say?

"upstart Copyright © 2010 Canonical Ltd. Author: Scott James Remnant [email protected]"

Notice the rather large and significant difference? systemd is copyright Lennart Poettering. It is not copyright Red Hat. Upstart is copyright Canonical.

Lennart works for Red Hat - right now. He is free to leave at any point. If he does, he still owns systemd. Red Hat does not. systemd would still live at freedesktop.org and Lennart would still control the project. He could go work for SUSE or Canonical or anyone else he liked, and systemd would still be his project. Not Red Hat's.

Upstart is Canonical's project. It lives in Canonical's domain and is copyrighted by the company. I believe, if Scott leaves Canonical, he does not retain control of upstart.

So no. systemd is not Red Hat's secret plot to...(anything at all) because Red Hat does not own systemd. Lennart does.

Comments

Cyberax wrote on 2013-11-28 18:43:
Are you saying that systemd is _Lennart's_ secret plot to dominate the world?
adamw wrote on 2013-11-28 18:50:
*says "no", nods "yes"*
Frank Ch. Eigler wrote on 2013-11-28 19:09:
Considering the fork-friendly licensing of the respective projects, being a copyright holder doesn't mean ownership in any sort of exclusive sense.
adamw wrote on 2013-11-28 19:13:
frank: things start getting mushier and boringly counterfactual if you go down that route. I'm just trying to point out in a simple way that, no, systemd is not an evil RH plot for anything.
vorbote wrote on 2013-11-30 01:03:
To further your argument: Scott James Remnant left Canonical to work at Google several years ago. He didn't take the project with him and if you examine the commit history of the last 3-4 years you'll find his contributions are minimal if exitent at all.