Quoting Peter Ross (petrosssit@gmail.com):
The problem seems that commercial (or more sinister?) interests at work so it is possible that such things are happening.
In the case of Red Hat, Inc. and some others, it's primarily because they wanted a comprehensive cgroups manager for cloud computing, and systemd was there and qualified. I doubt very much that Red Hat cared about practically any other part of systemd's feature set. They don't even care about desktop computing that forms the core of Lennart and his Freedesktop.org friends' obsessions.
All major Linux distributions have systemd now at its core...
Well, I'm sorry, but I have to take issue with your basic assumption that an init is at the core of a Linux distribution. (systemd's octopus-like feature set does aspire to be a great deal more than an init, but let's talk about init functionality for the time being for simplicity's sake, and also because those other aspiring bits of scope-creep are _not_ widely implemented by distros.) If you tell a Unix user his/her preference of init is about to be banned by law, he/she will grumble a bit, make new arrangements to stop/start about a dozen startup processes and system daemons, and that matter's done. Other than that, any PID1 process capable of fork-exec to start new processes and adopting orphan processes is a fungible replacement. Certainly, the PID 1 process is _important_ to a system, but choice of init per se is significant only to those dozen-per-system system services, and changing from one to another is not at all difficult, just slightly annoying.
...and I do not see any hope that it becomes easier to run Linux without it.
To the contrary, in my recent experience, it's trivial to run Linux without it -- on Debian 8.0 Jessie. Just 'apt-get install openrc' and a reboot changes the system over. Removing the systemd package thereafter is a problem on Debian Jessie really only for users of GNOME and NetworkManager, to whom I would say 'Don't Do That, Then.' I haven't tried removing the brain damage from RHEL7/CentOS7, let alone recent Fedora. I wouldn't be least surprised if that's more difficult.
The smartphone segment is more or less monopolised by Google-controlled Androids.
Which, by the way, defaults to a custom Google-written init. It comprises three programs: init, ueventd, and watchdogd (all of which hook into the basename of the argv[0] of the init program, meaning that the latter two are usually accessed as symlinks to init).
So it's not much different than, lets say, OpenSolaris, which was practically controlled by Sun, and with Oracle taking over, game over. Yes, it's not exactly dead but it's a fringe community which works on "the leftovers".
OpenSolaris's SMF is actually freely usable by other Unixen, but it's so dreadful and peculiar that nobody else wants to. The same is true of Apple Darwin's / OS X's launchd. (I once tried to figure out how to get OS X to autostart Unbound as a network service on a laptop, in order to have a local recursive nameserver. You quickly get lost in a horrid mess of underdocumented XML undergrowth. And, of course, the Macintoy user community is useless for that, because their attitude is 'If we'd been intended to have local recursive nameservers, the Church of Steve would have issued them.')
For me, it leaves FreeBSD as the "largest company independent open source operating system" (well, maybe not very good wording but you may get what I mean).
You're forgetting the many Linux distros where something other than systemd can be used with only trivial effort even if it's default upon installation (such as Debian 8.0 Jessie), and others that pointedly avoid it out of distaste: Gentoo/Funtoo, Manjaro, Slackware, Zenwalk, SourceMage, Sorceror Linux, Salix, Vector Linux, etc. Personally, I'd rather stick with Debian, where, as mentioned, eschewing systemd continues to be trivially easy (provided you're not enamoured of GNOME or NetworkManager, in which case you'll have the same big problem on Debian or anywhere else). One of my friends encountered problems on the new-ish OpenSUSE release that he blamed on systemd. He threw a fit in numerous online screeds, then blew his system away and installed Manjaro, which he says he's very happy with. I suspect he massively overreacted, but have not kept up on OpenSUSE to say for certain.
But for many many things you can use FreeBSD and it works as well, or often better, than Linux does.
I was a FreeBSD guy before I started using Linux in 1993, and I was a 386BSD guy before that, so you don't need to tell _me_ it's a fine and usable system. I already know that. (I do wish you luck with breadth and recentness of hardware support. You may need it.)
E.g. the current setup where I work now, with VMware ESXi and CentOS, is simply inferior to the way I could manage FreeBSD/ZFS/jails over the last years.
Yeah, FreeBSD jails are an excellent thing. Linux could get there with a good cgroups manager that doesn't insist it needs to be PID 1 and doesn't aspire to take over the world.