and why i think it's great for community driven things.
SUSE the company has built a build service where you give them your source, they return you binaries on most major linux distros, all for free. The source I upload goes into this the home:sipfoundry project. You may have to create an account to see it, but not to download the binaries from it.
But it gets even better. If you think the source should have feature XYZ and the people that upload to this project disagree with you, you can "extend" this build project, upload just the source for the features you want and have it your way in your local sandbox.
When you combine this with distributed source code management system like git, where you can extend projects at the source code level, then you are truly in control.
This comes with a lot of responsibility because you need to get your changes back upstream or you'll forever be maintaining your changes. So this is really best for tweaking a release to your satisfaction and not a replacement for getting involved in upstream development.
What's also nice about having independent build service is that it gives you yet another safeguard. If SUSE cannot compile it, then sources are incomplete or build process is misconfigured.
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