That is my point, they have tried and failed completely before when their main product was windows licenses. Now, linux is incredibly important to their azure business, they wouldn't want to potentially cause detriment to that and is far more important to them than windows licenses.
Also why would we have to rip out systemd, even if they tried to claim ownership of it and make it proprietary, it could be forked from before the license change and we would keep on going like nothing happened.
Its certainly easier to read than most old init scripts and I can see why some distros and openbsd would pick it over systemd for more control. I'm not likely to pick a distro that uses it anytime soon, but i can see why some do.