I would say it&#x27;s more like RedHat has actually stepped up and made a &quot;Linux-derived OS&quot; the way that Android is a &quot;Linux-derived OS&quot; or OSX is a &quot;BSD-derived OS.&quot; They&#x27;ve thrown the &quot;basic Unix principles&quot;—the ones that make Linux distributions effectively interchangable commodities, but with software having to target a <i>very low</i> lowest-common-denominator of functionality—to the side, and instead adopted a complete &quot;base system API&quot;, in the same sense that CoreFoundation+Cocoa is for OSX, and Win32 is for Windows.<p>As with those other APIs, you can now &quot;target systemd&quot; in the same way you could &quot;target Win32&quot; or &quot;target Android&quot;—and, because of this, we&#x27;ll probably see a virtualization library (like winelib is for Win32; like ARC is for Android) spring up, giving other OSes the ability to provide the &quot;systemd API&quot; without needing to run a Linux kernel.<p>From RedHat&#x27;s perspective, they were just trying to copy OSX and Android: making a &quot;real OS&quot; atop Unix-y foundations. The interesting thing is that a large number of other providers in the Linux space has started to agree with their design decisions—effectively unifying on the &quot;systemd platform&quot; rather than on the &quot;Posix platform&quot; they were focusing on previously.<p>I think this has been coming for a long time; the large OS providers already think of Desktop Environments as the GUI equivalent to a &quot;platform&quot; rather than as application software for the OS; thus why Ubuntu, for example, has a separate distribution for each GUI software suite.<p>In a discussion of systemd history held here previously, it was pointed out that back in 2007-or-so, there was a large amount of interest expressed by various distro makers in adopting OSX&#x27;s launchd as the basis for a new platform standard, if only it had been FOSS at the time. Early systemd was a launchd clone; upstart also started as a launchd clone before mutating.<p>I have a feeling that although RedHat was the one to step up and <i>create</i> a platform, <i>all</i> of the major distro providers were actually waiting to hop on the first available FOSS &quot;OS platform&quot;, no matter who it came from. If, for example, Apple had created &quot;Apple Linux&quot;: a version of Linux that runs the OSX GUI and OSX apps—then I can bet you right now that every other distro would have standardized on whatever &quot;platform&quot; gunk was in-between that GUI and the Linux kernel; CoreFoundation et al would have become to Linux distros as WebKit is to mobile web browsers.<p>As it stands, it&#x27;s only an accident of history that this didn&#x27;t happen with the <i>Android</i> platform. (If the Android Runtime ran native-speed binaries from the start, and the GUI was developed five-or-so years later such that it was developed from the start with Win8-like unified desktop&#x2F;mobile support in mind rather than getting type-cast as &quot;only for mobile devices&quot;, I could bet that Linux would &quot;be&quot; Android now.)<p>---<p>With all that said, while all the <i>big, commercially-backed</i> Linux providers have been waiting on tenterhooks for a &quot;platform&quot; to latch onto, all the little distros are looking to remain Unix-y, and that&#x27;s a wonderful thing.<p>Think about it: when you&#x27;ve got the POSIX platform &quot;for desktops and servers&quot; and the Android platform &quot;for mobile&quot;, and nary the twain shall meet, it makes little sense to care about cross-compatibility; why would you want to run Android apps natively on your desktop? But if you add in a third platform that&#x27;s <i>also</i> for desktop—the systemd platform—suddenly kernel developers and distro makers and whatever you call the FreeDesktop people start thinking about how to create a Linux-based OS that natively supports <i>multiple</i> platforms, so that it can run code targeting systemd, <i>and</i> code targeting Plain-old-POSIX, without making a mess. And once you have that infrastructure in place... why not let it run code targeting Android too? Why not first-class Wine support? Etc.<p>One thing Windows has had forever (though lately in a degraded state) is multi-runtime (or, given the above discourse, multi-&quot;platform&quot;) support. Windows can be Win32 to one program, OS&#x2F;2 to another, and POSIX to a third. OSX had the capability for multi-runtime support back when it was called Rhapsody (the &quot;Red Box, Blue Box, Yellow Box&quot; architecture) and also co-supported Cocoa and Carbon apps for about a decade. And these are just single companies trying to meet small needs. Linux, the OS with a kernel that supports every device a nerd ever cared to packet-probe, could easily become &quot;the multi-runtime OS&quot;, if we care enough to make it that way.<p>If we don&#x27;t, though, at least systemd is decent. :P