Is anyone from here involved with the project at all?
I'm not involved in the project, but there's been much talk of it lately. There's a large part of the Debian community that don't like that Debian has decided to go the way of Red Had and Ubuntu by using systemd. They want to keep the old Unix sysvinit service and structure (e.g.- /etc/init.d), but keep up with the rest of the Debian packages.
I believe there's others besides Devuan, but that's the only deference between it and regular Debian. While systemd does boot slightly faster, may of the sysvinit crowd note advantages and reasons for keeping it.
I still haven't decided which side of the fence I'm on.
The core developers of systemd seem like jerks. For Lennart Poettering to stand on stage at DebConf and blab on about how init and upstart were "systematically flawed" seems quite arrogant.
For what it does, it seems good, but it was described as the "svchost.exe" of Linux which, for anyone who's tried to figure out what the hell svchost.exe on Windows is doing, would appreciate 
As for the Debian fork, "just" to maintain SysVInit as the default init, seems a bit extreme, but that's the beauty of open source - do what you want!
I have not kept up with this stuff - it appears a bit more theological than technical. However Ubuntu is/was dependent on debian development. So the fork will really impact Ubuntu in the future -- unless of course Ubuntu completely went off on its own.
From what I have heard Ubuntu is not planning any fork at this time. Red Hat 7 is going to systemd and Ubuntu is going to it soon, like regular Debain.
The push for the fork you mentioned came from die-hards in the Debian community. Someone in the Ubuntu community would have re-write a future release of Ubuntu with the old sysvinit intact. So far I've not heard or seen any talk of this on the web for Ubuntu or Red Hat. Only part of the Debian community is fighting it and making a separate distro over it.
Part of the debate is theological, but a lot of tech divides are there as well. I suggest you check out this article when you have time.
Initially, the stated goal of System D, i.e. to parallelize startup of Linux system services, was laudable and not very many people objected to that design goal.
Now people are realizing that System D is rapidly expanding to include a huge number of Linux system services, plumbing and more. As a result many userland applications are no longer very portable because of increasing dependencies on System D functionality.
System D's present goal appears to be to standardize a very large swatch of userland functionality. Who knows what their future goals are!
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