A lot of whining, little substance

A lot of whining, little substance

Not exactly. You could still allow volunteers to help, assuming you allow free download (e.g: skype, acrobat reader?)

Binary incompatibility issues indeed require a rebuild. No way around this. But the vendor only needs to release a set of binaries for all platforms.

Volunteers can later package them in e.g. RPMs for their specific distros.
Thisngs like menu files, cron files, location of documentation directory, dependencies and whatever.