Ian Jackson's general resolution to prevent init system coupling has failed to pass, the majority vote deciding that the resolution is unnecessary. This means that not only will Debian's default init be systemd, but packages will not be required to support other init systems. Presumably, this means that using other init systems on Debian (without using systemd as a base) will not be possible without major workarounds, or possibly at all. It also leaves the future of Debian projects such as kFreeBSD unclear, as systemd is linux specific.
The vote results can be found here
The winners are:
Option 4 "General Resolution is not required"
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:28PM
You can product tie to wedge stuff no one wants into place. Thats how we got systemd today instead of decade ago when it was technically possible but no one wanted it. The innovation of systemd is combining "nobody wants gnome but nobody wants to get rid of it" with "maybe we could product tie our project with gnome, using it to force us in"
Two other issues. Devs have never been king of their castle. If the FTPmasters don't like the license (usually because the dev totally Fed up documenting it) then its not going in. Or if you insist on not following Policy, out it goes, the easy way or the hard way. Or if you insist on not following the social contract / constitution, if someone wants to enforce that (not this time) then the dev is out. And there's a common sense machine usage policy (like no turning your private file space into a warez site or spamming) and a couple other rules.
Its mythological that the dev gets to be a tyrant over all the rest of humanity. systemd upstream actually thinks that way. Devs in general do not, and when they screw up its mostly honest ignorance or philosophical disagreement, or they haven't thought thru false assumptions, or occasionally I believe their paycheck is what is doing the talking although thats quite rare. Truely crazy debian devs are pretty rare. Upstream, maybe not so rare.