A developer affiliated with boycottsystemd.org has announced and released a fork of systemd, sardonically named uselessd.
The gist of it:
uselessd (the useless daemon, or the daemon that uses less... depending on your viewpoint) is a project which aims to reduce systemd to a base initd, process supervisor and transactional dependency system, while minimizing intrusiveness and isolationism. Basically, it’s systemd with the superfluous stuff cut out, a (relatively) coherent idea of what it wants to be, support for non-glibc platforms and an approach that aims to minimize complicated design.
uselessd is still in its early stages and it is not recommended for regular use or system integration, but nonetheless, below is what we have thus far.
They then go on to tout being able to compile on libc implementations besides glibc, stripping out unnecessary daemons and unit classes, working without udev or the journal, replacing systemd-fsck with a service file, and early work on a FreeBSD port (though not yet running).
Responses from the wider Linux community are yet to be heard.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Sunday September 21 2014, @08:29PM
I think I'm going to have to respectfully disagree about Trusting Redhat == Making Linux Great. Not needing to take anyone at their word and being able to be in control of your system is what made Linux great, and is why even after this whole fiasco with systemd, it'll still be around. I just hope we don't see more software lock-in with programs unnecessarily requiring one init system over the other...just ask anyone who has opted for just ALSA how much they love the fact that Skype requires pulseaudio as of the latest version.
Choice is a great thing...the uproar here is because people feel like a choice was made for them without their being consulted. Was the change wrong? Not really, you can manage your distro however you like. Could it have been handled better to upset fewer users and handle things more smoothly? Absolutely. I'd say this is almost indistinguishable from when Facebook or Google add a new "feature" that you get opted into by default. Are they allowed to? Sure, they're private servers, and you don't have any kind of contract with them forbidding it, so not a problem. Can you choose to not use them? Often enough, with more ore less effort required on your part. Do people get extremely angry, generally preferring to have been asked if they wanted this new "feature" before having it thrust upon them? Always.
What the distros engaging in this behavior hopefully all asked themselves before making the changes was "Will the advantages of this new software overall outweigh the harm caused by the infuriated portions of our userbase?" If they did so, I can't hold anything against them, and it is now up to the angry users to do something to help themselves rather than continue to complain about the quality of their free handouts.