14 DAY TRIAL // A group of unknown developers have proposed a while ago to fork Debian in an effort to create a parallel project that would go on without Systemd. It seemed ridiculous at the time and many have thought that it was just just some kind of pressure, but it looks like the project is real enough.
When Debian adopted system, a part of the community was not happy. It's been months since that decision was reached and discussions about it are still happening.
Debian is a Linux distribution used as a base by many other projects and its community is actually much bigger than people would imagine. It's also a well-known fact that most communities will also have a number of disgruntled individuals that will be very virulent about the issues they care about.
The Fork Debian initiative didn't seem like a big deal and many people thought that it was actually a joke or, at best, a way to pressure the Technical Committee to change its might. It even sounds a little like blackmail.
In any case, now the same people are actually going through with their plan and they are even asking for donations, but they are no longer anonymous and that's a start.
Forking Debian might not be a success story
If you were to take a look at the SteamOS FAQ you would notice that they say it's a Debian fork. It might not seem like much, but it's been done.
Technically, it's possible and it wouldn't be a difficult job for a couple of seasoned programmers, but Debian is too entrenched in the Linux community and this fork will never get enough traction, or at least not right way. The new distro is called Devuan, but that's less important.
"Devuan aims to be a base distribution whose mission is protect the freedom of its community of users and developers. Its priority is to enable diversity, interoperability and backward compatibility for existing Debian users and downstream distributions willing to preserve Init freedom. We plan to innovate many of the tools that were historically used in Debian development, still mainaining stable, testing and unstable package repositories that users and downstream can use."
"Devuan will derive its own installer and package repositories from Debian, modifying them where necessary, with the first goal of removing systemd, still inheriting the Debian development workflow while continuing it on a different path: free from bloat as a minimalist base distro should be. Our objective for the spring of 2015 is that users will be able to switch from Debian 7 to Devuan 1 smoothly, as if they would dist-upgrade to Jessie," reads the devuan.org website.
The goal has been set for the first months of 2015, which is very close. This is not something that can be done overnight, so it remains to be seen just how many people actually hate systemd and how many will move from Debian to Devuan.