It’s always been possible to port your application into any Linux distribution. All you had to do was know how to compile and link your program with each distribution’s libraries and then package it up in either DEB or RPM package. Easy! Right? Right??
OK, so actually it’s never been that easy to move applications from Unix to Linux or from one Linux family to another. The basics are simple. It’s all those nagging details of which library version is in one distribution and not in another and the like that makes porting programs a problem.
Now, thanks to the joint efforts of the Linux Foundation and openSUSE, any programmer has a straightforward way to get their program up and working in any Linux distribution without pulling out their hair. It’s called the openSUSE Build Service. Despite the name, the Build Service actually enables you to create packages not just for openSUSE, but for the Red Hat family-CentOS, Fedora, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux-the Debian/Ubuntu group, and Mandriva.