Come on guys, I see a lot of negativity here but we can have the cake and eat it. Look at the following imaginary but likely scenario. A promising coder creates an app in C using cmake or whatever. For a veteran linux user to use git and compile is not a problem. Our up and comming coder want to reach out to a wider audience however so instead of creating X packages he provides an appimage. All of the sudden all the fedora, debian and ubuntu guys etcetera can run it without the hassle.
Now imagine if the project turns out to be a silver bullet for some really important problem. What will happen, the maintainers for the bigger distros will simply download the code and there will be maintainers that steps up and maintains the software for the repos.
Voila, the best of two worlds.
... and if the project doesn't become a huge mainstream access users now can get it via source or appimage .
As far as commercial projects are concerned they will operate according to different dynamics. But who cares we want open source solutions for our linux systems anyway.
Now imagine if the project turns out to be a silver bullet for some really important problem. What will happen, the maintainers for the bigger distros will simply download the code and there will be maintainers that steps up and maintains the software for the repos.
Voila, the best of two worlds.
... and if the project doesn't become a huge mainstream access users now can get it via source or appimage .
As far as commercial projects are concerned they will operate according to different dynamics. But who cares we want open source solutions for our linux systems anyway.