Yay for Clang

Posted Jan 27, 2026 8:32 UTC (Tue) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876)
In reply to: Yay for Clang by Wol
Parent article: GNU C Library 2.43 released

> systemd is not (and never has been) Red Hat software

To quote the "History" section on the systemd Wikipedia page: "Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers, the software engineers then working for Red Hat who initially developed systemd,"

Lennart built systemd on Fedora and first released it to the world on a Fedora 13 QEMU image. I think Fedora was the first distro to adopt it. Fedora being the place that future Red Hat engineering appears first.

But it is not even important to my point that Red Hat invented systemd. My point is that, once they adopt it into their platform, they work to make it essential by making sure that the rest of the system relies on it.

> if you're the local Great White, why should you care about the small fry around you?

I cannot argue with that and it was not actually my intention to. I do not use Red Hat distros but I do enjoy a lot of the software that they create and or contribute to. And I do see the value in a standard Linux platform as the default.

to post comments

Yay for Clang

Posted Jan 27, 2026 9:41 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

To quote the "History" section on the systemd Wikipedia page: "Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers, the software engineers then working for Red Hat who initially developed systemd,"

Like many prominent Linux developers, Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers “worked for” Red Hat in the sense that Red Hat was paying them a stipend to enable them to do whatever it was that they would be doing anyway. It's not as if their boss called them into his office one morning and told them to write systemd.

Also, systemd became popular not merely because Red Hat pushed it once it was there, but because most other mainstream distributions, too, quickly realised that it was a huge improvement on the status quo (including Upstart, which had run into limitations of its design). At that point, Linux was the only Unix-like system that still relied on the System-V init approach from the 1980s; all commercial Unixes had already moved on to newer infrastructure that was more like systemd than it was like System-V init, and it was fairly clear that something new and more suitable for the 21st century was needed on the Linux side, too.