Ha, from ongoing discussions surrounding Systemd/Init in Debian, anybody could have predicted this was going to happen sooner or later.
Well, it has happened.
A fork of Debian has been announced by the “Veteran Unix Admin collective.”
The name of the Debian fork is Devuan, an Italian name that’s pronounced like DevOne. The following is from the groups webpage:
Devuan aims to be a base distribution whose mission is protect the freedom of its community of users and developers. Its priority is to enable diversity, interoperability and backward compatibility for existing Debian users and downstream distributions willing to preserve Init freedom.
Devuan will derive its own installer and package repositories from Debian, modifying them where necessary, with the first goal of removing systemd, still inheriting the Debian development workflow while continuing it on a different path: free from bloat as a minimalist base distro should be. Our objective for the spring of 2015 is that users will be able to switch from Debian 7 to Devuan 1 smoothly, as if they would dist-upgrade to Jessie, and start using our package repositories.
So come next spring, I’ll be reviewing the first edition of Devuan. There’s never a dull moment in Linuxland. The group is calling for your help, so if you wish to join the coalition of the willing and able, visit http://debianfork.org/.
Eddie, your vision is very limited.
We (i’m part of the VUA group) are mandated to work on devuan to mantain freedom, many of us are already DD, many of us are long time sysadmin but working as freelancers, and many of us are committed to be free software developers from long time.
We are not building a “who pay the bill will rule distro”, but just what our experience and what our philosophy tell to us is the right way to follow.
Franco, where do you see this project 1 year from Spring of 2015?
The “Veteran Unix Admin collective.” That name says it all. They can do all the forks they want to, but if these people have a real job then they will do what their employer tells them to. They may even have to learn something new. The sad thing is they make all of these threats and it is just spitting in the wind. If they have their own business then it really is irrelevant because they still have to do what their customer tells them to. If they are just hobbiest then why would anyone else care? What everyone will use will be determined by the one paying the bills and not so called software purist, or so called freedom fighters. Some people need to take a walk with reality.