"Speaking of the battle with Redmond -- and strategies for
victory -- an interesting conversation arose when TuxRadar recently
asked the question, "Do we need a standard package format?"
"A virtual stampede of more than 120 comments greeted the
question on TuxRadar before it was picked up on Digg as well.
""No," wrote person-b in the comments following the TuxRadar
post. "Nobody needs a unified format. Everybody should just use
'alien' to convert packages to their native format if the owners
can't be bothered to package it properly.""