Application builds are costlier than OS builds (Score 1)

Expense in the open source world can be measured in the time spent dealing with the software. If you aren't rewarded for your time, then the software has no value.

The problem is open source applications are becoming exponentially more complex, even more than the operating systems they run on.

For instance, it takes a couple of hours to rebuild an entire FreeBSD operating system on a AMD 750 with 256 megs of ram. But with Gentoo Linux on a Celeron 2.6Ghz with a half a gig of faster memory, it takes at least 18 hours to build KDE.

The tools and developer knowledge we have these days is still geared to building operating systems, not applications.