GNOME and/or systemd

> look at what I was replying to. The person was criticizing people for working with upstart instead of joining the existing systemd project and just modifying that instead.
What I criticise is essentially not the upstart developers' actions, but their motivation. There are two strong indications for NIH syndrome: the fact that upstart was developed at Canonical/Ubuntu, and the fact that various distros have or are considering to switch away from upstart in favour of systemd. The latter is a strong hint that there are significant technical benefits to doing so, as switching the init system is a fair amount of work. Creating a new project is fine if you have good technical reasons for doing so. But if you go your own way "just because", then that just makes everybody's lives harder.

Too much unity leads to stagnation and monopolies, too much diversity leads to chaos, bikeshedding and infighting. Neither is good for the linux community as a whole, and we should work on finding a middle ground. Today, we're way too far on the bikeshedding side of that fine line, and I happen to think that upstart is one part of that problem.