launchd makes heavy use of Mach IPC ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel) ) which makes a port to any other non Mach derived OS a non trivial effort. There was apparently an effort to port it to FreeBSD - https://wiki.freebsd.org/launchd and more recently https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd/blob/master/README.md .