Debian community splits over systemd, but fork still unlikely
"What is important is that distributions make an informed decision on whether to ship it, and base that decision on the technical implementation, user experience, and benefits, not pointless political bickering," he said.
The technical arguments over systemd's merits have also been distorted by personality conflicts. Systemd principal Lennart Poettering and several of his co-creators have garnered a reputation for arrogance and inflexibility among other open-source developers, who accuse them of casually breaking compatibility among other software modules, among other things.
That's led to outright abuse in the past, as Poettering catalogued in a much-discussed Google+ post earlier this month, in which he detailed death threats he has received and slammed Linus Torvalds for contributing to a general lack of civility in the Linux community.
A discussion period for a Debian proposal that would "preserve the freedom of choice for init systems" could end as early as Oct. 30. The effect of the fork threat could become clearer as the month wears on.