> Why is systemd in openSUSE? How was that decision made? If I were in the leadership of SUSE

That decision was made by the openSUSE community. openSUSE is not owned by SUSE in any sense, the community is run by the users and developers of the distribution. There is a board that is elected by the community (and no single company can have >50% of the board seats), but it's role is more dealing with conflicts than anything else.

openSUSE chose to use systemd because some people stepped up and did the necessary work to support systemd. And yes, people still complain about it, but the key point is that nobody has put work into replacing it. There is no reason that openSUSE couldn't support running everything without systemd -- nobody would stop you from doing that work -- but in our community the people who make such decisions are the people who do the work.

> I would hate being so dependent on key software that is essentially controlled by my largest competitor.

Ha-ha, it appears as though you don't understand how free software development works in this context. While Red Hat is a competitor to us, we work with them on their upstream projects just as they work with us on our upstream projects. I spend a large part of my day collaborating with my counterparts at Red Hat. Hell, I'm a co-maintainer with several folks from Red Hat and I contribute to their projects in my free time.

If a customer doesn't like us, they can go to Red Hat. If they don't like Red Hat, they can come to us. If they don't like either they can go to Canonical or wherever else. Hell, we even provide support for migrating to SUSE from Red Hat (and I believe they have the inverse). The benefit of building everything on free software is that you don't have vendor lockin, and systems like this really do "just work".

> For people to switch away from systemd, they would need to be convinced that something like GNU Shepherd wasn't just equal, but was significantly better. That seems unlikely to happen anytime soon.

So you agree that systemd solves problems that are not solved by other systems? Then I don't understand what you're arguing for -- should we intentionally ship software that doesn't solve user problems? Or wait for the community to decide on the best way to move forward before we ship a release (hint: those arguments will never end)?

If you want to get people to switch you need to have an alternative, it's a simple as that.

> This state of affairs has to hurt SUSE.

That's kind of like saying that because 'shadow' is developed by Debian it must hurt Red Hat. Or because Apache is developed by the Apache Foundation that must hurt Canonical. It's a nonsensical argument, that's now how free software works.

> When selecting a distribution, why wouldn't businesses buy from companies as far "upstream" as possible? Why buy software from SUSE if key pieces come from Red Hat? Why not just buy from Red Hat directly?

First of all, Red Hat uses many pieces of our software as well, this is a symbiotic relationship. Red Hat is not the only player (in fact we were around before them). Their new dnf package manager uses our libsolv RPM solver implementation. They are using openQA to perform testing of Fedora. kGraft and kSplice were merged upstream thanks to being able to compare the two approaches and come to a solid decision. There are many such examples.

But to answer your question, it's because we sell different systems with different opinions on how to do things. I'm not going to give you the marketing pitch (I'm an engineer), but we have plenty of really interesting technology that we ship in our products that Red Hat chose not to use (and vice-versa). SUSE and Red Hat both sell operating systems, but they are very clearly distinct and potential customers are given a choice with who they want to do business with.