Karl Berry Olaf Bachmann and many others. These two rules are mandated by the GNU Coding Standards, and are just good ideas in any case, because it is convenient for the end user to have the version information easily accessible while building a package. It removes any doubt when she goes back to an old tree after some time away from it. The unpacked archive is completely portable, to the extent of Automake's ability to enforce this. It notices if you are using GNU tar and arranges to create portable archives in this case.
People do sometimes want to make other sorts of distributions.
Automake allows this through the use of options. These files are popular for Windows distributions.