jrb explained the origin story to me once in passing at a gnome meetup in SF irl ages ago. But the only part I recall is it involved Lennart and Kay collaborating on a new init system on their own... without rh even initiating the project. I got the impression that this was a sort of rogue effort from these guys.
Folks direct a lot of systemd hate at Lennart, but just take a look at the journald header[0]:
uint8_t signature[8]; /* "LPKSHHRH" */
== Lennart Poettering, Kay Siver, Harald Hoyer, Red Hat
I don't know the details but I heard at some point Kay and Lennart had a falling out within the project. By the time I got involved in journald development @ CoreOS, neither Kay nor Harald were visibly participating anymore... It was kind of annoying, as it left just Lennart to review any journald PRs, who was obviously busy, but eventually got around to it. I think it's worth noting that despite being the person who receives all the systemd hate, Lennart didn't promptly abandon maintenance of the project after getting installed everywhere.
[0] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/v255/src/libsystemd/...
