Distributing Free Software: Herding Cats

published 18 March 2014 in obs

Post image

The basic challenge of distributing Free Software is compiling that awesome open source code into machine code for different Linux distributions so it's easily consumable for users. Sounds simple, but it isn't. If you look at the dependencies of a typical Free Software project you will find thousands of other projects in the stack. They build on top of each other, have functional dependencies, sometimes they are interdependent, they conflict with each other and what not. In short: Building Free Software is like herding cats. And rightfully users of the software expect a steady, well behaved, streamlined herd of cats! The Open Build Service (OBS) is the tool which makes this possible, it helps Free Software distributors to automatically and consistently build binary packages from free and open source code.

Continue reading...