The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

If people who want systemd features on BSD want to go down this path the option is always available to port systemd to a new OS with its own repo. Different OSs make different decisions though, BSD already had a totally different init system than most Linux systems, and has a different kernel with different features. If you are a userspace software developer, the kernel and low level plumbing outside of POSIX (packet filtering, or *notify or kqueue or cgroups, jails or namespaces) on different systems is going to always be different, if you use a platform-specific feature then you have to think about portability, either re-implementing chunks of code for different kernels or accepting that you can only run on a particular platform.

GNOME still runs on BSD, just without the session management that it would get on Linux, if people start using other systemd features (like the watchdog or relying on it for daemonization) then they will need to have fallbacks if they want to be portable or *BSDs will have to add the appropriate tools.