Every night we have a job (run by jenkins I think) download the latest ffmpeg code, add some non-approved patched, and cross compile to static binaries for x64 linux, osx, and windows (we've dropped the 32 bit linux build)

It's not hard to make a static binary.

On the other hand most of the "software" I write - mainly shell scripts - includes things like apache configuration, requires other applications (like apache, iperf, tcpdump, lldp, etc)

I want to deploy these to multiple boxes, I want them versioned, I want them easy to update, I want to know what version is installed. All of this is handled by a 10 line config file in a .deb.

Distro packagers do nothing for you if:

- Your app isn't licensed in the way you like

- You don't want to provide the source code to your app

- They don't find your app interesting enough

- They don't agree with your app's policies

Static linking is a much better response for actually getting the program running on Linux systems but this still leaves out the "is there a way I can package it once for Linux" problem.

Now if it's a CLI only utility/service type tool it's a different story.

Except, if you need to pay rent and put your kids through college, shipping source tarballs is going to significantly reduce revenue for a small developer. (It's sad, but it does.)

A few years ago I tried to compile a C++ project into a static binary which would work on both Ubuntu and CentOS.

Long story short, it wasn't possible. Because the latest versions of Ubuntu and CentOS at the time used different versions of glibc which were mutually incompatible.