alt Hacker News> which would be Ubuntu's NIH syndrome
Red Hat do the same. They reinvented the wheel on multiple occasions (systemd and it's whole ecosystem like systemd-resolved and timed and the whole kitchen sink; podman, buildah, dnf, etc etc.)
They just have more success on getting their NIH babies accepted as the standard by everyone else. Canonical just fail at that (often for good reasons, Unity was downright crap for some time) and abandon stuff, which doesn't help their future causes.
Replies
> systemd
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530
> like systemd-resolved and timed
They're not forced on anybody, they're not required by systemd, and many distributions use more feature-rich alternatives (including, afaik, RHEL — last time I looked at it, they used dnsmasq and chrony). They're also often shipped as separate optional packages:
$ apt search 'systemd-timesyncd|systemd-resolved'
systemd-resolved/testing,now 257.7-1 amd64
systemd-timesyncd/testing 257.7-1 amd64
Still not anywhere near as popular as Docker. Although technically they're far better than Docker, and if anyone is using them, it's for that reason.
> dnf
Only used by RHEL and its upstream Fedora?
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All of this makes very little sense.
Red Hat builds really good stuff. NIH is sometimes right because nobody invented the stuff at all. Standard Unix tools are great but they don't solve everything, so we've ended up with most distros having "the Debian way" or "the Red Hat way", the main difference of course being deb/apt/dpkg vs rpm/yum/dnf. When building an embedded system with Yocto, the basic choices are also Debian or Red Hat style, though you can of course do anything.
Special mention goes to NetworkManager, which has become the de facto standard way to configure networking because it's good. And with nmcli I can even remember how to connect to wifi from single user mode.
>They just have more success on getting their NIH babies accepted as the standard by everyone else.
This depends on the phrasing. We could also say that Red Hat produces actually useful software, in contrast with Canonical, whose developments don't seem to provide value over existing solutions.
We could also say that Canonical tries really hard to do exactly what Red Hat does, but in a slightly different space, and not very successfully.
Canonical did their own NIH init daemon called Upstart which failed due to the fundamental design and the implementation being plain bad. Redhat builds better software which is why their NIH gets more adoption.