I was responding to the article, not writing a standalone article about systemd. Regarding standardization, I agree completely, and that's one of the problems systemd is trying to solve: rather than writing eight init scripts, you can write one systemd service file. That's partly due to systemd standardizing various features that distros previously had to reinvent, and partly due to a general philosophy that treats gratuitous differences between distributions as a bug to be fixed rather than a feature to be reveled in. When writing a systemd service, if you encountered an issue that would require you to have a distribution-specific service file, you could very reasonably report it as a bug and get it fixed.
What is systemd doing in terms of inter-Unix portability? Unix is not only Linux. Also; standardisation means not to be used all over. It means to be bound from below and above so that there is an interface that can be trusted to exist in all the adherents of that standard. For example, Linux may have send_sher_shcön(7) exposed exclusively, but we can be sure that there is send(2), for portability concerns.
