In preference to Canonical, yes. systemd is more open, has a greater count of contributors, and is already more widely adopted with more distros planning their

In preference to Canonical, yes. systemd is more open, has a greater count of contributors, and is already more widely adopted with more distros planning their move to it. I'm not saying it's without problems, but anything (including keeping sysvinit) is better than Upstart. GNOME is practically a Red Hat project these days, but people aren't advocating its removal (although yes, GNOME is awful since 3.x) As it is, Red Hat already maintain or otherwise have a hand in a lot of things that are in Debian - seeing them as somehow adversarial isn't true, while Canonical have a long tradition of keeping their own work close to their chest and not sending improvements upstream.