Feature added by: Gary Pikula (shadoweva09) Feature #308289, revision 1 Title: Dedicate More third party support openSUSE-11.3: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Important Requested by: Gary Pikula (shadoweva09) Partner organization: openSUSE.org Description: All of the desktop Linux distributions could definitely benefit from better third party software support. The case right now is that a company may decide to dedicate resource to make their software Linux compatible, but likely will only dedicate enough resources to make it .rpm, .deb, or .tar.gz packages and nothing else because of the small market share. They also don't want their software being hosted in repository servers and keep control over distribution. I know the politics usually go that the should use our package format and our repositories, but they don't and certain reasons come up that make it impossible to do so (like Skype needing to protect their phone bills). Since they didn't use the format the user has, the user has to do all the work getting it to work and they suffer. Use Case: A user is using a distribution that uses rpm install files and needs to install commercial software to connect to their school's application server. The company that makes the software only dedicated enough resources to make the debian package. The user now has to install and learn to use special software to make the client software work. If there was a special way of handling Third party software that businesses were encouraged to use and all desktop Linux distributions supported that way of software management the users would not suffer, and business would not have to choose between which package format to allocate project funds for. Business case (Partner benefit): openSUSE.org: To put an end to the second rate treatment of software that's not in repositories, make the user experience much better for people using third party software, and reduce costs for companies developing software for desktop Linux by eliminating the need to create multiple packages. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/308289