Open source release engineering: a higher standard. Suppose Microsoft, or any commercial software developer, had to package up not only the end product, but also the entire process for building it from source -- for dozens of slightly-varying platforms. The amazing thing is not that build processes sometimes need to be kicked or cajoled, but that they exist at all. It's a tribute to the power of scripting to automate wildly complex sequences of operations, and to the ingenuity of open source programmers who build and maintain all that automation in addition to the software that it supports. [Jon's Radio]
