Most open-source projects let you build the configure script on your computer. They either provide a tiny script named autogen.sh or tell you to call autoreconf

Most open-source projects let you build the configure script on your computer. They either provide a tiny script named autogen.sh or tell you to call autoreconf -fi manually. They might track the auto-generated configure script as fallback for people without autotools installed, but no one really edits those.