Yet another person writing fantasy, not facts. Systemd wasn't "quickly" made a hard dependency. It was a soft dependency for ages, then eventually the release team made a mistake around systemd-logind. I was part of the GNOME release team at that time. Still, GNOME runs without systemd. Meanwhile we had loads of discussions with loads of distributions.
Yet the things you write: quickly done, apparently lots of people were secretly paid by Red Hat, forcing distributions? All devoid of any facts, just emotions that dismiss the amount of work me and loads of volunteers have done.
"Debian GNOME packagers are planning the same AFAIK; they rather just rely on systemd (as init system, not just some dependencies). In the end, the number of distributions not having systemd decreases."
That was written by Olav Vitters, of the GNOME Release Team, who later admitted[2] "Personally I’m totally biased and think the only realistic choice is systemd."
You could argue that any blame for this dependency therefore lies with the Debian packagers, rather than Red Hat employees, but actually, if you look into the history, there was already a push for making GNOME dependent on systemd three years earlier by none other than Lennart Poettering.[3]
Even at that time, Josselin Mouette, founder of the Debian GNOME team, obsequiously replied "I don’t have anything against requiring systemd, since it is definitely the best init system out there currently" and later acknowledged the influence Red Hat had over the direction of GNOME, saying "Red Hat being the company spending the most on GNOME, it is obvious that their employees work on making things work for their distribution" and "on the whole we don’t intend to diverge from the upstream design, on which a lot of good work has been done."[4]
So there was definitely pressure on Debian from GNOME to make systemd the default init, and pressure from Red Hat to make GNOME depend on systemd. Whether or not these decisions were all coordinated in advance in a smoke-filled room is beside the point, given that things worked out exactly the way such a conspiracy would have wanted.
[0] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708#5
[1] https://blogs.gnome.org/ovitters/2013/09/25/gnome-and-logind...
[2] https://blogs.gnome.org/ovitters/2014/02/03/my-thoughts-on-t...
[3] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2011-May/...
[4] https://raphaelhertzog.com/2012/01/27/people-behind-debian-j...
If you want to claim that process was democratic, you have to believe that the members of the committee perfectly represent the opinions of all Debian developers (to say nothing of Debian users), and therefore have to excuse the fact that the vote had to be settled by giving one of those people, Bdale Garbee (HP's CTO of Linux), effectively two votes.
It was only three days after the tech committee's decision that Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu would fall in line by abandoning Upstart[0], and not until many months later that the first General Resolution was put forward to try overturning the committee.[1] Of course by that time everyone was tired of the arguments and it would have soured relations with Canonical to force Ubuntu back away from systemd, so the GR was doomed from the start.
[0] https://www.admin-magazine.com/News/Ubuntu-Abandons-Upstart
