Sorry, this is wrong in many aspects.

FreeBSD/*BSD traditionally maintains userland and kernel together. The userland is also BSD licenced so using GNU is not possible so there is need to maintain these tools. But mostly it's taken from a shared upstream with some specific patches. There are seldom new components that introduce huge changes. There is also mostly a single community that decides on changes. This has led to splits in the past but usually things are consensual.

systemd as a project was/is mostly driven by Red Hat and kind of praised itself into distributions due to eating udev and that would have required a fork (Gentoo did that with eudev). Debian almost self destructed in the discussions and it's mostly unrelated with the kernel. They tried to push kdbus but this was denied. So there was some split between distribution developers (systemd made a lot of stuff easier and was the new upstream for must-have-components) and users (never change a running system) about that. This has caused lot's of nasty fallout on the internet - mostly from the users that were opposed. But both sides kind of heated the debates.

> So if you dislike the tight coupling of components in systemd, why on earth would you go to FreeBSD which is a whole OS developed with tight coupling ?

Source lying in the same git repository is not tight coupling. Depending on dbus,journald,logind kind of is, but systemd is not really tightly coupled it's more like there are components that can be used and software has to adapt to use it (GNOME, kwin migrated to logind on Linux), tmux and screen likely will adapt to the user sessions. So you kind of have to use it on Linux, to not be an outsider and run unmodified upstream tools.

I guess tight coupling is that you have to use the whole systemd package and can't just pick e.g. logind or the udev parts on your system. These won't work without everything else. So it's far more coupled than FreeBSD at the moment.

FreeBSD maintains only the typical POSIX/UNIX userland. No one tells you what to do and most userland is pluggable - e.g. they have a patched OpenSSH and Sendmail as default - this can be disabled with 2 lines and you can install OpenSSH and Postfix and everything will work fine. You can also exchange syslog or ditch cron and run runit and runwhen instead. Everything will still work after that. You need to know what are you doing through but that's kind of the mindset of using BSD.

It's almost impossible to rip out e.g. journald or dbus of a systemd distribution. It's not necessarily bad it's just a different idea.

> So I think this is nonsense, as I see it, it's just FreeBSD advocates trying to play off the systemd controversy in Linux land.

Actually I've never saw this from FreeBSD devs - there might be some fanbois, like everywhere but usually it's a more professional and calmer community. FreeBSD is and was always quite popular on HN there are a few core members here as well. FreeBSD has a lot of merits that Linux lacks or does slightly different. Clang, DTrace, ZFS, Jails, ByHyve... so it's an interesting topic to talk about.

I guess most FreeBSD users don't need to badmouth Linux and even FreeBSD is looking into getting a new init based on launchd or some alternative - not sure what the current status is - because dependency resolution and reaction to events becomes important. Unit files are also a good idea that will spread. There is also SVC from Solaris that inspired systemd (amongst others) so there is nothing spectacular unique or new that systemd offers in regards to init.

Most criticism against systemd also has nothing to do with the init aspect but with policy choices and defaults from the maintainers e.g. arbitrary new limits or changing default behavior or rewriting old tools in a manner that is disliked by some. Recently Ubuntu decided to include the systemd-resolved resolver and that caused some fallout due to certain assumptions from the devs.

So systemd kind of changes the whole Linux ecosystem - IMHO in an honest attempt to improve it - and this usually causes some breakage even if it's for the better and if you just want to run your Unix and don't need the features you not really enjoy the ride. E.g. because the most events your server gets is a new IPv6 prefix once every 2 years you don't just need all the new bells and whistles. A lot of experienced devs and sysadmins also voiced conceptional and design complaints but I'm not able to judge that really. Some of it looks very reasonable.

TL;DR systemd is not just init - it changes Linux and causes fallout - FreeBSD was always popular and it's getting attractive for servers due to these changes.