People have been warning this for a decade and nobody listened.

But I am shocked to know Lennart "Systemd" Poettering is working for Microsoft.

To be fair with Microsoft, they are only following Red Hat's playbook.

Red Hat has been doing this for 3 decades: they pay for conferences, they donate for projects and they hire developers working in such projects.

This was how Red Hat took influence over almost the entire Linux desktop stack: GTK, Gnome, Flatpack, Wayland, Systemd, Pulseaudio and many others fundamental pieces of software have their development process controlled by Red Hat employees.

Microsoft is just following what already worked.