Have you ever seen a nifty program in Linux Format, but couldn’t find it in your favourite distro? If you were running a proprietary OS, you think that you’d have to ask the programmer to produce a version for you, but with FOSS that isn’t how things work.
One of the wonders of the FOSS world is that you may not have to wait to run that program. Truth is that anyone can take any open source program and build a package from the source code. You can choose to run it on your machine. If it works well on your box, you can then submit your package to be included in the distribution of your choice.
If that sounds cool, if a little terrifying, here’s a tool to make packaging easier: the Open Build Service (OBS). OBS enables anyone create a repository of source files on a cloud server (or their own server) and build software packages for a variety of distros in popular formats: RPM, DEB, Flatpak and AppImage.
You don’t really have to know much about code to make packages with OBS. If you have some experience installing and working with packages, or helped others with issues on a mailing list or forum, you might just be the type to be an OBS packager. Bonus points if you (a) have a Github (or similar)
