As ever, solidarity matters. The only way to get out of these embrace, extend, extinguish cycles is to form independent organizations that are never beholden to

As ever, solidarity matters. The only way to get out of these embrace, extend, extinguish cycles is to form independent organizations that are never beholden to a single company or even a small handful. Individuals can't stand up to the efforts of teams of company-paid developers just by contributing their free time. But it's very hard to create such an organization without the companies immediately recognizing the need to stuff as many of their proxies into said org to gain influence, and that's a difficult thing to counter. As an ecosystem, we need to contend not only with whether a particular thing like systemd works well or solves a problem but also whether it has predatory intentions. This is simply what the incentives lead to unless the community has a strong voice to counter such attempts. And in this day and age, that also includes dealing with all the submarine articles and other consent manufacturing that are well within the budget of any large company to try to fake organic community discourse.