Novell’s openSUSE build service will now have the ability to build code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS. This is in addition to its support for Debian and Ubuntu distros.

An excerpt from ChannelWeb:

Justin Steinman, Novell’s director of marketing for Linux and open platforms, said the expansion was requested by open source developers that provide packages for multiple distributions from the same source code. “They told us in late summer we needed to expand the openSUSE build service to Red Hat and CentOS,” he said. “So we worked through the fall on that.”

He compares packages to Lego bricks, and says openSUSE allows those bricks to work in any number of distributions. “Developers said, ‘We are one Linux community and I want to get as many different people as possible attracted to my package,'” Steinman explained. “That’s the beauty of open-source, at the community level we work together.”

The move seems like a standardization process coming to the open-source space.

More information:

Novell developer tool embraces main rival (News.com)