Canonical Drops Upstart for systemd in Ubuntu Linux

Lately, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, has seemed to do everything it can to make Ubuntu less like other leading open source operating systems. But now it has taken a small step in the opposite direction with the announcement last week that Ubuntu, following the lead of the Debian Linux distribution, will replace its homegrown Upstart software with systemd, an upstream alternative.

If you’re an ordinary Linux user, you probably don’t think about Upstart or systemd very often, or ever. Both are utterly under-the-hood—albeit essential—pieces of software. They start and manage the system processes that, for the most part, run quietely in the background to power the operating system.

From the end user perspective, it shouldn’t make any real difference at all whether Ubuntu uses Upstart or systemd to manage processes. They both do the same thing, and they both do it well.

But the reason this news is news is that systemd is software created by the freedesktop.org project, not Canonical. In contrast, Upstart was developed by Canonical beginning in 2006. That means Canonical, quite uncharacteristically, is abandoning one of the parts of Ubuntu it created itself in favor of code that it doesn’t directly control.

That’s very different from what Canonical has done with other key parts of the Ubuntu operating system, such as the Unity interface, with which Canonical replaced GNOME as the default environment interface for Ubuntu starting in 2011, and the Mir display server, Canonical’s answer to the X.org server that virtually every desktop Linux distribution has used for as long as anyone can remember. More recently, Ubuntu developers have been weighing abandoning the Nautilus file browser in favor of something they write themselves.

So why give up now on Upstart, a project in which Canonical has invested significantly over the years? According to Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth, the decision was all about remaining consistent with Debian, another Linux distribution that also recently announced that it would be adopting systemd. Since Ubuntu borrows a huge proportion of its code from Debian, that decision makes a lot of sense.

Might this also be a sign that Canonical wants to scale back its go-it-alone approach to open source software development? Perhaps so, at least in a small way. This change is hardly as momentous as the one from GNOME to Unity, for example, but it does mean Canonical and Ubuntu will be marching just a bit more in step with the rest of the open source pack.