Ubuntu founder and inspiration Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Ubuntu will abandon the Upstart service management daemon and embrace the systemd alternative. The announcement comes only three days after the Debian project voted to support systemd. For the past few years, Upstart and systemd have been vying for the chance to replace the ancient init service management daemon, which is popular throughout the Linux world but is considered unsuitable for the next generation of mobile applications and integrated web development.
Ubuntu is based on Debian, so with the Debian community coalescing around systemd, Shuttleworth and the Ubuntu developers decided it wasn't worth the effort to continue to produce an independent alternative. According to Shuttleworth, "...the decision is for systemd, and given that Ubuntu is quite centrally a member of the Debian family, that's a decision we support. I will ask members of the Ubuntu community to help to implement this decision efficiently, bringing systemd into both Debian and Ubuntu safely and expeditiously."
A vast number of Linux distributions are based on code from Debian, Red Hat, or Ubuntu. Red Hat has already made a large investment in systemd. With Debian and Ubuntu electing to adopt systemd, it seems inevitable that systemd will now become the universal replacement for init and the standard service management daemon for Linux systems.