Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 16th Dec 2009 21:38 UTC, submitted by whorider
This news is already a week old, but it only got submitted to us today, and I didn't notice it all. As it turns out, two malicious software packages had been uploaded to GNOME-Look.org, masquerading as valid .deb packages (a GNOME screensaver and theme, respectively).
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Member since:
2005-11-11
It seems to me, none of the major distros are willing to work together to create such a standard, and a mechanism to work with it though.
Such a standard would bypass the advantages of a distro software repository as outlined by Lemur. You are proposing something that would allow third parties to package something up in binary format to be run by (m)any distro without being "audited" by the distro team. What they should be doing and all they should have to worry about is providing source code and letting the distros package it.
A universal binary format is only of interest to software that someone doesn't want distributed in source code format, which really doesn't belong on an open system, at least according to some. Such a format is certainly not an answer to the security questions posed by the poisoned theme in the article.