Open Build Service - Cross-Distribution Packaging

The Open Build Service (OBS) is an open and complete software distribution development platform. It provides the infrastructure to create software packages for a wide range of operating systems and hardware architectures as well as add-ons, appliance images or entire linux distributions.

OBS provides the tools to work collaboratively, supporting access rights, merge requests and review functionality. Users can access OBS via a convenient web interface, as well as a commandline tool or via the extensive API.

Rather than using "compiler farms" of different hardware to build packages for different architectures and multiple Linux distributions like Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, the OBS creates a clean virtual instance for each build, saving the user time and resources.

OBS takes care of any dependency changes and rebuilds packages when needed. It can directly pull source from Source Code Management systems like SVN and git. It is also possible to link to other projects on OBS to build against their
more current packages. There's also feature comparison of OBS and similar systems.

OBS is free software licensed under GPL and freely available in both source form and as easily deployable appliance.

OBS is used by a variety of projects to build packages, appliances or entire distributions. The openSUSE community employs OBS to build openSUSE since 2008 and SUSE builds SUSE Linux Enterprise with OBS. the Linux Foundation has a Open Build Service instance to build their linux distribution MeeGo. Other well known parties using OBS include the VLC project, GNOME3, Dell and Cray Supercomputers.

The OBS is developed under the umbrella of the openSUSE project.