Finding the Devuan email in my inbox this morning was very happy news. I have been lurking on the lists since as soon as I learned about it, and following the unfolding of the systemd trainwreck for a long time now. I am happy to help with the devuan project in whatever capacity I can.

I am not a developer, I learned that a long time ago :) I am a long time systems wrangler of some sort or the other for a long time though. I currently run a Drupal devshop and hosting business. I can help with system administration, providing servers, and some limited community organising. I am perpetually busy and short of time, but will do what I can. As I sporting a bit of a beard again, and it has considerably more grey than when my github profile picture was taken, so I guess I have some qualifications to be here :)

Please do let me know how and where I can help, https://github.com/devuan/devuan-baseconf/issues/1 looks like a good place to start, I will need some idea on required specs for the server, access details for people etc.

A bit of background, for those interested. (TLDR; Business Politics got me to leave as an active open source participant, systemd got me to consider coming back.)

Although not a developer, I used to be a very active Open Source participant many years ago, and was one of the founding members of the OpenOffice Community Council (http://lwn.net/Articles/25285/). Unfortunately, Sun was upset with our  manoeuvrings, I worked for Computacenter as the open source technical architect and with Computacenter and Sun being best buddies, I was placed under some pressure to use my position for the benefit of Sun. I decided to withdraw my active participation in the Open Source community (as well as my employment with CC shortly after that) as it stopped being fun.

I am a longtime Ubuntu user in my "professional" capacity, coming to Ubuntu from Debian, needing more modern packages, etc. The announcement by Mark that Ubuntu was going to systemd was a serious shock, as it meant I had to find a new OS for our operations, with all the related changes to our environment etc. this change would bring with it. Enough bytes have been processed discussing the (lack of) merits of systemd, I won't rehash those - we are mostly all here for the same reasons. My perspective, from a business owners' point of view, is that I don't really get excited about the init system, sysvinit, OpenRC, upstart etc. - all good. Systemd however just isn't fit for (my) purpose, and being forced to use systemd without sane alternatives presents and unacceptable business and operational risk. How the likes of Mark don't see this is beyond me. From a systems architect point of view, systemd makes me want to cry.

At the moment, I am deeply concerned as I feel that as a business, we have no real alternative place to go. Alpine is hard work and a bit too bare, and Gentoo, whilst nice, is... well.. Gentoo... Also, funroll-loops.org (http://fun.irq.dk/funroll-loops.org/ for the younger members of the community). I did look at BSD but again, a lot of work, a lot of changes, etc.

Anyway, I have servers I can contribute, am not a bad systems architect / sysadmin, and am happy to help in anyway I can.

(I apologise for the big corporate email signature that is auto-tacked to the end of this mail, I will resubscribe with a more suitable account)




Kind regards,

Martijn Dekkers
Managing Director

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