The Open Build Service (OBS) is a generic system to build and distribute binary packages from sources in an automatic, consistent and reproducible way. You can release packages as well as updates, add-ons, appliances and entire distributions for a wide range of operating systems and hardware architectures.
Your users can always download the latest version of your software as binary packages for their operating system. They use the package management tools they are familiar with and will get your software just like they get software from their OS supplier. They don't have to know about tarballs, make install, package formats or other stuff from the 90's. Once they are connected to your repository, you can serve them with maintenance or security updates and even add-ons for your software. The OBS makes it a breeze for you, to make it super easy for them to enjoy your software!
The OBS builds your packages in a jailed environment that the OBS setups from scratch each time and once your build succeeds it also rebuilds all the depending packages for you. That way you get an automatic, consistent and reproducible build of your software so you always know what you deliver to your users. There is also no need anymore for you to maintain a lot of different OS installations on a lot of different hardware architectures or to deal with "compiler farms". Let the OBS help you to concentrate on packaging, that's what you are here to do, right?
The OBS, through it's project model, has collaboration built in and will help you to harness the power of the open source development model. Your developers get a one-stop-shop experience for all their software packaging and releasing needs. The OBS API allows different clients and external services to interface and to use its resources. Of course OBS is free software, licensed under GPL, and can be installed on your hardware, in your data center so you keep all your data under your control.
Our reference implementation for openSUSE, at build.opensuse.org, currently has almost 30.000 users that are building over 140.000 packages for 21 base distributions on 6 architectures. Besides the openSUSE project, a large number of other Free and Open Source projects like Tizen, VideoLAN, companies like Dell, Cray or Intel, but also universities are running their own instances of the OBS.
