Lennart didn't force anything on GNOME, please stop these false claims.
The GNOME developers simply had two choices: keep using the old, bug-ridden and still-unmaintained ConsoleKit or switch to the simpler, more powerful logind D-Bus interface.
ConsoleKit is still more-or-less supported upstream, but given it's extreme bugginess many distro choose to disable it and rely on logind interfaces.
Note that this does not mean that GNOME depends on systemd: as long as something else is implementing the needed logind interfaces (eg. systemd-shims) GNOME will happily run.
And no, a maintainer refusing patches is absolutely not "antithetical to the spirit of open source". The spirit of open source is that you can fork if you don't agree with a maintainer. It's simple as that.
The GNOME developers simply had two choices: keep using the old, bug-ridden and still-unmaintained ConsoleKit or switch to the simpler, more powerful logind D-Bus interface.
ConsoleKit is still more-or-less supported upstream, but given it's extreme bugginess many distro choose to disable it and rely on logind interfaces.
Note that this does not mean that GNOME depends on systemd: as long as something else is implementing the needed logind interfaces (eg. systemd-shims) GNOME will happily run.
And no, a maintainer refusing patches is absolutely not "antithetical to the spirit of open source". The spirit of open source is that you can fork if you don't agree with a maintainer. It's simple as that.