Sun-Spider

I love this bit from the article:

To a request for comment, X only sent Ars an auto-response, saying, “Busy now, please check back later.” (To be fair, in this case “check back later” is a good summary of what happened.)

Yeah exactly. It does have some features that require integration with the init system, which systemd obviously supports, but it could be used independently of systemd quite happily, and other init systems could easily support those integrations.

Its not a bad comparison. Sure, some details might differ, but the underlying concept of a build that only uses the open source code is the same.