Untz: Results of the App Installer meeting, and some thoughts on cross-distro collaboration

This is the old "we need a common platform" argument and whether it's true or not doesn't seem to be important because we don't seem any closer, today, to actually doing it than we were ten years ago. I don't know that you can get cats to march in a line that straight and I think other solutions should be explored instead.

Creating platforms is a problem that has been up to now in the domain of the distribution. Most non-enterprise distributions don't actually worry about it at all, much less do it (except by chance). To have a third party dictate (or suggest) a platform to distributions is hard because (a) the distributions don't know what a platform is and (b) they won't like dancing to someone else's tune, especially if the advertised payoff is "More work for you but less work for people who are not you."