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Devuan and I got off to a bad start. The first link I clicked to their site was flagged by Firefox as possibly malicious. Continuing to their home page brought me to what would have been considered campy even in the 90s. I suspected a scam, or at least rank amateurism, and figured a short life for the project.
They recently released an "update on the progress of the Devuan.org," and I took a second look, especially at their finances.
The finances of the Devuan project are administered by the Dyne.org foundation, an international organization based in Amsterdam.
Dyne.org commits to financial transparency and will publish financial reports for this project, keeping them updated every year.
Their current financial report for 2014 is available as a pdf download.
Surprisingly, with all the anti-systemd trolling out there that they could cash in on, they're instead taking the high road.
We must not become acquainted to the fact that systemd discussions are swarmed by trolls fostering aggressive behaviour and personalized attacks of sorts. With the Devuan project and its early Debianfork declaration we did our best to avoid such dynamics, to bring forward a constructive discussion and action plan to respond to the systemd avalanche with technical analyses and solutions.
We kindly ask the community gathering around Devuan to take us seriously on this and avoid aggressive behaviour. Everyone should use extra attention when engaging criticism and in any case avoid any personalization, but stick to facts.
Their open professionalism is impressive. We could be seeing the birth of the next major player in Linux.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 24 2014, @01:04PM
Wrong parameters? Basing a first impression on how an organization presents themselves is using the correct parameters. I'm not aware of any printed materials or videos, so their website is it. If an organization is trying to attract interest, new members & volunteers, and donations, they should make the effort to present themselves in a way that is easy to approach, read and understand. The devuan.org website does not make that effort.
I'm not saying it should be one of those Wordpressy, parallax congested pukefests that have been littering up the web recently. Nor should it be a Geocities throwback of tables and frames. But it should have some level of order & organization, some segregation of content, and some navigation.
I want Devuan to succeed. I really do. I am a Debian user who is against the "shove systemd down your throat" movement. I sent an email offering to redo the Devuan website for free with free hosting, but I never heard back from them. I even wanted to donate $ but stopped when I got the "malicious website" warning. I wrote them about that, too, but never heard back. They are probably very busy, but too busy to ignore offers of free labor and/or donations? Even if it's just to say "no thanks, we love our site" or "here's the PayPal link"?
If the first impressions you give are "you must make an effort just to learn about us" and "don't bother asking questions because we don't return emails" then that is how people will interpret who you are.