http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316
With this move most big distributions will be using systemd. Upstart is essentially a dead project now and sysv init will be around on legacy systems.
A unified init system and management daemon is getting really important so this step is definitely a good one, in my opinion.
Upsart should have died long ago.
Maybe - but you have to give them credit for making the init system better. They started before systemd and thus systemd could probably avoid all wrong decisions which upstart made.
I just remembered that ChromeOS also uses upstart. Not a normal gnu/linux distro but interesting nevertheless.
I agree that upstart was good as a tool, but I don't like where it comes from-canonical. The code contributors agreements they make people sign, their philosophies in general I just don't agree with. I hope the same happens to Mir.
Well, CLA's are not really uncommon, especially if you work for a company all your copyright is transferred to them and to be honest, I think it's often better having a project with CLA with a GPL license than having a permissive license without CLA but that entirely depends on the CLA itself. Still kinda agree on the CLA thingy.
Other than that, I can't find anything very special in their philosophies which makes them less good than other company supported distributions.