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 fnj on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:53PM
But there is no goddam use for the thing except for the user community. It would be just a shiny monument if nobody used it. And those users do not have to "contribute" to be the only reason that the distro exists. It is gratuitously disgusting to suggest that "non-contributors" do not matter. If the users want X and those in the ivory tower only deign to provide Y, sorry, those in the ivory tower are assholes.
OTOH obviously you can't please everybody all the time. In due course we shall see whether the distro has jumped the shark or continues to flourish.
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Thursday November 20 2014, @05:30AM
Free Software in general has long been developed by people to scratch a need of their own, not to selflessly serve some unknown mass of people out there. Many Debian developers probably got involved in Linux for such a reason. Thus even if some group of uncontributing users get pissed off at the developers, so what? The technology already works for the developers.
Indeed, those of us who are leaving Debian because of systemd are moving to distros where we probably will have to be quite hands-on to make it fit our needs, and maybe contribute a few patches and bug reports back to automate that tweaking. Will we do all that because we want to serve the world? No, we'll do it because we had to meet our own needs.
No, this is a case of conflicting needs, not one party being an asshole. Users (some users, let's not overestimate the amount of people who are passionate about systemd) want one tool they think makes their life easier, while developers want another tool that they think makes their life easier. The correct thing in such a case is for the Debian population to split up. Hopefully the non-systemd-distros, once they get an influx of energetic new developers, will fare well enough to avoid systemd in the long term. I am sure that Debian will continue to do just fine.