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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: 4, Informative) by Pav on Wednesday December 24 2014, @02:39PM
The sysvinit package (and upstream) maintainer chimed in on this - it was on IRC... I don't have transcripts unfortunately. He said he had been very supportive of systemd as an alternative in the early days, even going as far as doing a lot of extra work to make their lives easier. On the other hand they never reciprocated... even seemingly trivial changes (to make coexistence possible) have been flatly rejected by the systemd people. Of course this is his story, though he wasn't shouting it at the sky - it just came out when others asked him about how the situation evolved.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday December 24 2014, @05:09PM
I'd believe it because I have read Pottering's writings. He isn't exactly hiding his plans. It ain't about the init. He sees no point in trying to work with others since the plan is to eliminate them, to eliminate the possibility of competing software. He is already dreaming of essentially ending the package manager wars by banishing package management to a tool used to build a distro but something an end user would never see. Everything will be controlled by Pottering OS.
Which I have no problem with, and I doubt many others in the 'oh hell no' camp do either. He should chase his dream and as long as RedHat is willing to bet the company on it he should take them and as many of their customers along for the ride as will go. Where I object is the POS camp's Highlander attitude of 'there can be only one' where the existance of a traditional UNIX style OS atop the Linux kernel is an affront to them and they must attack. If they would abandon the 'all knees must bend to me' mindset there would be no friction in the Open Source world over this issue.
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Wednesday December 24 2014, @08:54PM
I agree with your points, but what keeps me worried is the fact is that if they were able to take over Debian for their evil plans, then they can probably do the same to the Linux kernel too. Linus doesn't seem to have much of a problem with what the systemd camp is doing, so we can't really depend on him or any of the other kernel lead devs taking a stand in principle for the freedom of user choice. They've never really seen things that way, to be honest. So today, we can fork udev and create our own init systems, but what if someday, the Linux kernel itself is completely tied into systemd the same way that systemd is tied to Linux?
Yes, there's always BSD, but from a technical perspective, Linux really is an awesome product and it would suck to see it go the way of Debian.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday December 24 2014, @11:24PM
This is going to be a real world test of the assertion that free software can't be owned.
People will either be able to maintain a kernel with well defined interfaces on which they can build their systems, or we will need to rethink categories in the era of commercial interests leveraging FOSS: proprietary software, Free software, and Really Free software, which obeys both the letter and the spirit of free software.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Thursday December 25 2014, @09:21AM
One can fork the Linux kernel too... although I don't think it will be needed any time soon.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Thursday December 25 2014, @02:16PM
Understood that the kernel can be forked, but I think that's a much more serious undertaking. I don't think it would be necessary for a while either, but again, if Debian could go down, why not Linux?