Re: "Yet strangely all of it perfectly GPL compliant"
GPL licensed software is not somehow immune to circular dependencies, whether accidental or injected deliberately to exclude alternatives (a la the supposedly "modular" components of systemd). It's also not immune to the sort of propaganda campaigns designed to stigmatise and marginalise detractors of this hostile takeover, forcing them to either resign or capitulate, exponentially spreading adoption of something that, in the absence of such an orchestrated campaign, would otherwise have been rejected en mass.
The tactics employed by the Poettering cabal remind me a lot of the Holocaust: invent some fictional problem, then blame a scapegoat as justification for a "final solution", in order to replace something perfectly good with something perfectly vile.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
