Zimmerman: We’ve packaged all of the free software…what now?

> Ie, the app producer don't have a choice of actually supporting their
> users.

OTOH if you need support for how one application behaves with another, or with the OS itself, which the app producer may have little or no knowledge of, then that's where you need the support from the package distributer. This is frequently the case in my experience. Also there's nothing keeping you from submitting a bug to the product's bug tracking system. Add this to the fact that many people are actually paying for support from the distributer and not the producer, then it also makes more sense to contact the distributer. In the same way that I don't have to hunt down the producer of the of the battery in my laptop when it's faulty.. I contact the the laptop's manufacturer because that's where I got the battery.

> And for users it's quite disruptive to update everything 6 months to
> get a new version of say... chrome and rhythmbox.

That's pretty distro-specific. Some distros don't have arbitrary time spans on package updates. :) Or you could always roll your own.

Are there still distros out there that don't have repositories with upgraded applications? If I need a newer version of an application than my distribution provides, I just head over to http://packages.opensuse-community.org/ and find a repository containing it. No need to wait 6 or 8 months.