The fact that you're mentioning launchd in the same breath as systemd and upstart suggests that you don't actually know a lot about the situation. launchd is a Mac OS X init equivalent. It has never, to the best of my knowledge, been ported to Linux at all.
The article's not particularly accurate on that note. There is a project to port launchd to FreeBSD, but it's basically stalled: no commits or mailing list posts in over a month, and it's not clear that it's even been successfully compiled on FreeBSD yet.
