You don't have to be a coder. You can also be a fundraiser, or just someone spreading the word about a new alternative, read: create interest in having alternatives. Or simply vote with your feed. You don't like systemd, but your distribution is switching to it? Well, then leave. I have done that with Debian and replaced it where ever possible (sadly my VPS provider won't add Slackware or Gentoo to the choice of operating systems).
Of course money plays a role, Linux has become a major player in the OS market and that naturally will bring companies to spend money on it, and naturally they want to invest in a way that they get more money back. Without that money the Linux kernel simply would not be in that good shape as it is now. Red Hat is the biggest single contributor to the kernel, only slightly overtaken by community contributions, yet nobody argues that they want to overtake the kernel.
But after all it is open source, it may be hard to compete with the big money, but it is possible. In the first place you have to try, of course. Look for example at the situation when Canonical (not a small company, though not as big as Red Hat) switched Ubuntu's main desktop to Unity. People left in masses and went to Mint, at that time a small underdog distribution. Why? Because they provided a better alternative. Look at (the in your words Red Hat funded) Gnome 3: How well worked the switch to the Gnome Shell interface for them? They went from being the most widely used desktop to one amongst many others, even Red Hat themselves had to made them to offer a "classic desktop" for their enterprise product. People just went to other projects, including Cinnamon, MATE and XFCE, all of them without corporate funding.

You can go ahead and try to tell the systemd developers that systemd sucks, we all know what will happen. Of course you can form an opinion and talk about it, but in the end something has to be done, I can't see anyone here working the problem out.

This is very true - if you're not a hacker, or in the position to fund the projects you care about, all you can do is vote with your feet. I was a Debian user from 2008 to 2012, but won't be going back to it now that systemd has been incorporated as the default init system, nor promoting/recommending it to others.

I do like Debian a lot and I've been a long time user, since 4.0. However, I now only run Debian in Virtualbox. Slackware and OpenBSD are my OSs now.
I cannot see SystemD making it in to Slackware 14.2. Just my opinion.

Look at me. I'm no coder myself. I can barely write scripts as it is, the highest education I have is a AS in Computer Science, I have only my CompTIA A+ 601 and 602 certifications, yet myself and Keith Hedger and Stoat have been working tirelessly to import a purebred Runit in to LFS without SysV as a backbone layer whereas other implementation did a hybrid implementation.

We kept Eudev alive long enough as well on LFS that it was eventually re-examined.

So, yes, I'm no coder. I probably couldn't tell you how to write a basic Hello World application in C++ if I wanted to with a gun to my head.

Yet look at the work we did. Look at how far we've come. Hell, I even found a patch on this forum to get Slackware 's HAL package build able on modern systems and submitted it on the forums here. Wasn't all my work, but it worked none the less.

Never say you CAN'T do something. Even if all you do is take patches and apply them to the sources, and can fully rebuild everything correctly,then that's basically maintaining a stable project in maintenance mode.

Side note: as long as your VPS provider lets you install any "usual suspect" among the distributions like Debian, CentOS or Ubuntu, you can easily install Slackware or Gentoo. Here's a blog article I wrote about the subject:


http://kikinovak.wordpress.com/2014/...ne-dedibox-sc/

Summary: install $DISTRO on your VPS, fire up a live rescue session, install Slackware64 14.0 manually without the installer, eventually upgrade to 14.1.

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Thanks, I will look into that.