Dear Init Freedom lovers,

Once again the Veteran Unix Admin collective salutes you!

As most of you know, we have followed up with our intentions in
developing Devuan GNU/Linux right after Ian Jackson's GR vote resolution
in Debian. We have made great progress and achieved several milestones
among them a complete SDK to facilitate package maintainance, a new
package repository software "Amprolla" and a continuous integration
workflow based on gitlab and Jenkins. We are also proud to have
facilitate the work of Jude Nelson on a new /dev daemon implementation
called VDev and more in general to have given voice to all those who had
doubts about systemd being a viable course of evolution for GNU/Linux
operating systems.


By doing so we have obviously looked deep inside Debian and systemd
itself and we have never refrained from critically analysing what
systemd was doing as well what we were doing and the reasons for it.

We firmly believe every responsible and critical engineer out there
should at least think twice about developing something new systems and
even Donald Knuth teaches us in the Art of Programming that is always
appropriate to re-think and re-design algorithms and challenge ourselves
over our own initial beliefs.


That's why today, after 7 months of work in the direction of forking
Debian we have decided that not, we will not do that. Today we give up
and we accept to be assimilated. After all, we think that systemd is
not so bad and we can live with it.

We understand some of you may not be convinced, but please consider our
decision here is really well thought. It is also too hard for us to
catch up with the rampant development going on in systemd and we believe
that we can live just fine with systemd and some shims. We tried hard,
now we hope you will believe us and even if you don't, at least please
give systemd a try.

With the existing infrastructure in place, we will start maintaining a
mirror of systemd and use our CI infrastructure to contribute
deterministic reproducible builds of Debian packages.

We ask the free and open source software community at large to please
accept our apologies for making so much noise on this issue, today we
feel like we have just been trolled by all those complainers we
initially gave voice and leverage, while it is evident they have nothing
to contribute really. It took us some time to understand that systemd is
the future and we hope this experience contributes to a critical
understanding of systemd.

To all those who have donated substantial amounts of money so far: we
commit to return you all the donations in EUR or Dogecoin. The donations
that cannot be returned will be used for a petition campaign to give
back Kay Sievers access to push modifications to the Linux kernel, as
well to distribute the upcoming O'Reilly book on systemd to poor
children in Africa.

so long and thanks for all the fish,

The Veteran Unix Admins