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This is a tired argument, but rpm the package-format was specified, not rpm the package installer. Even rpm-based distros don't rely exclusively on rpm as a package installation method.

And before anyone mentions it, .deb is a proprietary package format for Debian-based distributions. It doesn't matter if there are 700 different Debian-derived distributions on the planet.

And before anyone mentions it, proprietary doesn't have to mean closed or non-free. The point is .deb is designed for Debian distros. Period.

.rpm is, at least, distro agnostic.

Has nothing to do with package managers. You can use Smart with almost anything for instance, doesn't matter.

Then they should have specified some lowest common denominator, like .tgz, which you can unpack with just tar and gzip.

And while you can certainly install whatever native package manager your distribution uses along with RPM (which is still the only way to install RPM's) (okay, maybe alien counts), it's going to be a long time before I see any reason why I might want to install two package managers on my system, especially when whatever native one my distribution provides is vastly superior to RPM.

.rpm isn't really distro-agnostic. It's a package format designed for Red Hat.

With one exception that I'm aware of (SuSE, which was originally based on Slackware), all distros that use RPM files are derived from Red Hat. They may have diverged many years ago, but there are a lot of them.

It's actually pretty easy to read either .deb or .rpm package files without the associated tools. .deb files are just ar archives containing .tar.gz files of the actual software, and some metadata. .rpm files are cpio archives containing .tar.gz archives and metadata.

And what's the problem with that? LSB is good for ISVs to have a stable base, and since most paying coorperations use RHEL or SLES that seems to be a fair choice.