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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:12PM
Of course, due to its nature, it has the danger of soon being not merely a choice. If the application you need depends on Gnome, and Gnome depends on systemd, then you only have the choice to either not use the application, or to use systemd. And the more common systemd will be on popular distributions, the more likely new software will be dependent on it, and new versions of old software will become dependent of it, and other alternatives not dependent on it will be abandoned and bit-rot away.
Note that while it is possible to run a Gnome application on an otherwise non-Gnome desktop, using Gome only for those specific applications, it is not possible to use systemd just for those programs that need it. Need one program that requires systemd, and you'll have no choice but to let systemd manage your machine.
Given the strong opposition to systemd, there's hope that a strong alternative will emerge. However that will soon not just be a slight variation, with just a few different packages installed, but due to the nature of systemd, it will mean a hard split; after a decade, systemd-Linux and alternative Linux will likely not be much closer to each other than Linux and *BSD are today.