Managing Distributions from the Software Vendor's Perspective

This paper describes one vendor's quest for a simple distribution model for a software product which will install on (almost) any Linux distribution. The focus of this paper will primarily be minimising the vendor production and support costs and secondly improving the product's install-ability from the customer perspective. The goal will be to describe a method which achieves a significant lowering of the development costs associated with deploying on multiple flavours of Linux¹