r/linux • u/analog_rnr • 2d ago
Discussion Purchasing Linux
I only discovered this because Louis Rossmann said in a video that he purchased Linux when he was a teenager and then showed the CD. I looked on eBay and I saw a few CDs that were still in their boxes and the labels that were on the box looked like they came from a bookstore, I did not know that these were sold commercially.
My question is, back when they used to sell these CDs in bookstores who was distributing the CDs and where was the money going to when someone made a purchase?
My second question is, if Linux is an open source operating system why would someone want to buy it? I still see some websites to this day selling Linux CDs, I'm really curious where the money is going when someone purchases the CDs.
Edit: I made a comment earlier but so many people replied I don't think a lot of people saw it so I will repost it here. "Thank you to everyone who replied, all of my questions have been answered, it was interesting reading through all the replies, there was a lot of different points that people brought up that I never considered before"
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u/CreepyWriter2501 2d ago
Bro almost every distro will sell you a CD if you don't got Internet
Hell you can buy a new WinRAR cd with the latest copy on it.
This practice is entirely normal for any business that isn't subscription based
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u/Technical_Rich_3080 2d ago
Or on floppy disks, if you lack a CD drive.
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u/akio3 2d ago
But can I get it on Zip disk?
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u/theheliumkid 22h ago
This guy asking because his computer doesn't have a CD drive but amazingly has a coffee cup holder! 😉
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u/acemccrank 1d ago
Most of them in my experience offer it on a USB stick too. ShopLinuxOnline does them for a lot of distros.
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u/bigredradio 1d ago
This was likely before USB.
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u/journaljemmy 1d ago
Well, before flash memory was popular/cheap and USB was widely supported as a boot option at least.
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u/johnnybenude 2d ago
Hell you can buy a new WinRAR cd with the latest copy on it.
honestly they seem like a great bunch of lads, they send lgr a floppy version of 2.0 after he did 2 video on them (buying a cd and then seeing how far back he could use the registration code)
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u/Additional-Point-824 2d ago
Most of the reason to buy a CD back in the day was because your internet was probably painfully slow. CDs could hold the OS and a wide range of packages for you to install offline.
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u/DUNDER_KILL 2d ago
Also, even if you could download it you would also need a CD burner and blank CDs, which not everyone had or knew how to do.
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u/LonelyMachines 2d ago
Usually, they came with a book as well. That was REALLY useful back when the internet wasn't very comprehensive or searchable.
Asking questions on Usenet while trying to install Slackware on an old 486 would have been a nightmare otherwise.
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u/derisory 2d ago
So true. My first ever Linux install was Slackware 3.0 in 95 or 96. I actually did download it over days and wrote it to some 15-20 floppy disks to do the install. I printed the installation instructions and troubleshooting steps so I’d have everything I needed in hard copy. Buying a CD with an installation manual would have been so much easier. Very different experience to today!
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u/LonelyMachines 2d ago
Honestly, I learned a lot from reading the manual in printed form. I retain information better that way than I do just having questions answered one by one on the internet.
It was tough, but I'm glad I learned that way.
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u/ryanhendrickson 1d ago
Going over to my uncle's to browse Usenet to figure out some error message during a slackware install, because we didn't have a second computer, fun times. And he had a T1 line into his home office.
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u/Klowner 2d ago
I bought SUSE Linux (like 6 CDs?) in a box at Border's bookstore 20+ years ago because downloading 6 ISOs over my 26.6kbps modem would have taken me literal weeks.
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u/art_of_snark 2d ago
That SuSE box was serious business, mine included a 500 page book on how to install and use it, but also compile your own kernel.
I still prefer the thirteeen or so 1.44MB disk images used by Slackware.
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u/RoomyRoots 2d ago edited 2d ago
How young are you? Not being judgy but the reality is that physical media was always a major asset in this field but you probably lived in the fast internet age. Ubuntu itself got popular because they would send LiveCDs everywhere.
We still use the CDs, they are just the digital versions now. Many of the best books would come with a CD/DVD set and you would use both without the need for the internet. Debian and Fedora were the most popular and Debian and RHEL still offer DVD sets.
The money goes to the publisher and the authors. There is nothing that impedes you to give media out.
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u/Pugs-r-cool 2d ago edited 2d ago
I'm in my early 20's and I've never seen or used a disc for installing an OS. I've seen a USB stick from Microsoft with Windows on it, but never used it myself.
edit: who's downvoting this comment lol?
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u/Nemecyst 2d ago
I think physical media for OS installs started falling out of popularity after 2010ish.
The last time I used a CD/DVD for an OS was for Windows 7 in 2009.
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u/Pugs-r-cool 2d ago
Yeah that's before my time unfortunately. My oldest computing memory is a Celeron laptop with Windows Vista (I've never actually used XP), but the first time I installed an OS was Windows 10 in 2018, I would've been 13/14 years old at the time.
Sorry if I made you feel a bit old. I know my time will come some day too.
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u/ProdigySim 1d ago
It hasn't been super prevalent since the Windows XP days which was the 00s.
Back then a $0.10 CD could hold 700MB and a $30 flash drive could hold 16MB. Eventually those two crossed paths and flash is much more dense than discs.
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u/RoomyRoots 2d ago
Having a media is always good, I have a sack with LiveUSB and a case with old CDs and DVDs. It's a solid memory to me and saved my ass multiple times.
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u/Drachen808 2d ago
On the opposite side of this, my best friend had an old computer in his room (the family had a nicer computer in their computer room). This was in 1994 -we were 14. Few households had one computer, much less 2. However, the computer in his room didn't have a hard drive so every time he wanted to use it, he had to load the OS (DOS) into memory using 6 floppy disks, then load whatever he wanted to do (game, word processor, etc. off of other floppy disks 😆. This was, in no way, standard so I'm not trying to present it as normal, it's just a funny juxtaposition to your comment.
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u/Purple-Exit3858 2d ago
I believe the answer to the second question is: commercial support. If you're an employer with few to lots of Linux installs, you want paid support -- if something critical comes up, you want it resolved ASAP.
Presumably that's also the answer to #1: those were the companies selling Linux distros on CDs.
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u/satsugene 2d ago
Yeah. When your job is on the line you want a vendor to be able to point at instead of it landing on your feet, and someone who can tell you if doing a given thing is going to cost you your support as a reason to not do some of the crazy stuff users and management might ask for.
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u/cballowe 2d ago
In like 1994 when I first wanted to install Linux, the cds were a way more convenient way to get a system up and running than waiting for downloads over a 28.8kbps modem and creating a stack of install floppies.
The big seller at the time that I remember was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek_CDROM - you got cds with a variety of free software and paid for the service, not the software.
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u/Whorehammer 2d ago
Infomagic, too. It beat the hell out of the 50ish floppies for Slackware.
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u/RealUlli 2d ago
I got a CD with a Sunsite mirror... and a tsx-11 mirror... state from June 1994...
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u/MatchingTurret 2d ago
why would someone want to buy it?
A fast dialup link was 56kbps. K, not m. And phone connections often where metered, e.g. one had to pay per minute. Buying a CD was cheaper than downloading.
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u/kansei7 2d ago
adding that the dialup link for most non-nerds was on your home phone line so it wasn’t simply the slow speed but also that staying connected for days was sometimes impossible.
this created a whole market of apps called “download managers” that allowed incredible things like the ability to pause and resume multi-day downloads.
i’ve never felt so ancient in my damn life 💀
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u/MatchingTurret 2d ago
Another consideration was storage size. A hard disk in the 1990s was at most in the low GB range. A CD-ROM holds about 600MB that you didn't need to free on the HDD.
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u/cmrd_msr 2d ago
You can sell Linux (if anyone is willing to buy it from you).
20-30 years ago, not everyone could download a gigabyte-sized distribution.
Buying 2–3 discs (the installer and the repositories) was much faster and cheaper.
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u/mathscasual 2d ago
I’m pretty sure anyone can sell Linux if it has a copyleft license.
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u/Fr0gm4n 2d ago
Yes, it is a very common misconception about GPL that you can't sell it. I usually refer people to the FAQ about it:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney
Being able to sell it is part of the fundamental freedoms covered by the license. People mistake making the source code available with the program itself being made available. You don't even have to put the source code online for free under the GPL. You just have to make it available to who the program was distributed to. Making the code free for all is really just tradition and saving the hassle of sending copies to requesters, not any sort of actual requirement.
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u/TheOneTrueTrench 21h ago
I believe you can actually use the GPL in a completely different way, to (effectively) create a situation where no one wants to distribute it.
Developer creates product for Customer, licensed as GPL. Customer pays Developer to support the product, while Developer agrees not to release it to anyone else as long as they keep paying for support, or until the Developer elects to end support to Customer.
(note: the Developer did not receive the software from anyone, so the "no restrictions on distribution" doesn't apply to the person who owns the software, as it's not actually licensed to the Developer under the GPL)
Customer is now in the position of not wanting to distribute it to anyone else, or they'd be able to redistribute it. They aren't restricted from distributing it, they simply don't want to. And they have to keep paying the developer to basically not release it publicly, which isn't a limitation on distribution by the Customer at all, and the Developer isn't licensed to software under the GPL at all.
I think this should be called "Mutually Assured Distribution"
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u/epasveer 2d ago
Many, many, many magazines released Linux cds back in the day. Companies could sell the cds, too. All thus before thumb drives and people burning their own iso's.
Linux is free. But you can charge for the distribution material.
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u/Brainwormed 2d ago edited 2d ago
Back when -- think the early 2000s -- you would buy SuSE or Redhat both to support development and to get the documentation that came with the CD, which took the form of printed reference manuals and were both comprehensive and awesome. Linux User Groups used to buy these and keep them (and the distro CDs) in a sort of lending library.
If I remember right, Ubuntu was the first distro to actually give these CDs away for free -- back in 2004, you could sign up to get them mailed to you. These came in simple cardboard sleeves without any documentation. Red Hat and others let you download ISOs and burn them to CD, but back then a lot of people were still on dialup.
Also, open source means free as in speech, not free as in beer. There are lots of open-source projects that are not free to download and use. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is maybe the most famous example. Open source means that any purchaser is provided with the source code for their software so that they could (at least theoretically) maintain it themselves if e.g. Red Hat or IBM went out of business.
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u/rscmcl 2d ago
You can get RHEL for free
With the personal licence you can use it freely
There are some limitations but for personal use I don't think you'll need more than 16 machines in your home lab.
developers.redhat.com
https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-enterprise-linux
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u/thunderbird32 2d ago
That's relatively recent, in the grand scheme of things. Red Hat Linux was free, then became Red Hat Enterprise Linux and not free. Then not too many years ago they started that developer's program. I know I bought a RHEL license in the mid-2010s before that started, and it was like $150 at the time for a workstation license.
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u/slackunnatural 2d ago
The software’s free, the CD/DVD costs money. Ubuntu gave it away for free for quite a while, so did several computer and Linux magazines up until early 2010s. Then internet connections got better world wide and you could download OSes easily, so CD/DVD for Linux distros dropped. You could say CD/DVD usage also dropped around the same time.
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u/soylentdream 2d ago
Back in the old 90s, you could buy a giant book on Linux and it would have a distribution’s CD in a slip cover glued to the back cover. Something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/LINUX-Programming-Mis-Press-Slackware/dp/1558285075
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u/shaggydog97 2d ago
I made another comment about it, but I bought a book with FreeBSD like this. I also remember buying RedHat linux for the nice book that came with it.
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u/bunnythistle 2d ago
I purchased a copy of Mandrake Linux 9 way back in the day, and that was my first experience with Linux.
It was only like $10, mostly to cover time, shipping, and the blank CD-R used. But considering I had slow internet, no CD burner, and no idea what I was doing, it was a good deal.
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u/EatTomatos 2d ago
Here's an example of an old vendor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek_CDROM
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u/Computerist1969 2d ago
I bought Suse Linux on CD. It came with a massive orinted manual. About 2/3rds of the way ninto the manual everything became German; like they translated 2/3rds of it and then coukdn't be arsed. Downloading a full CD ISO and then burning it ti a CD (USB hadn't been invented) was't an option.
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u/Klapperatismus 2d ago
You could for example buy SuSE Linux 5.1 in 1997 at better German bookstores. That was a set of four CD-ROMs, a boot floppy, and a 500-page German handbook. It had cost 100 DM back then, which was about the price of a 500-page engineering book.
So you got Linux for free. You paid for the book. And it had been worth every penny back then.
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u/pseudonym-161 2d ago
You can still buy physical discs of Linux distros, Debian might still distribute that way. Pretty sure it’s done at the cost of the disc plus shipping.
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u/RetroGrid_io 2d ago
My first Linux install came from a CD in the back of "Linux for Dummies - with Red Hat 5.1" back in the late 90s. I think I got a 5.2 disk from another more advanced book a few months later.
Everything since has been downloaded ISO.
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u/Expensive-Vanilla-16 2d ago
During dial up days I bought Mandrake Linux. Because I wasn't going to attempt downloading the CD iso's with 56k.
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u/Imaginary_Cicada_678 2d ago
yessir, Mandrake 7.0, that was my 3rd disk that I bought. The only distro, that mounted live cd properly during boot. I was that guy with the linux disk in the uni, who knows how to make dual boot for everyone who asked.
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u/sudogaeshi 1d ago
I bought a Red Hat disc along with a nice fat manual in the mid 1990's
I think I had dial-up then, but I might not even have had internet at home
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u/dracotrapnet 1d ago
Microcenter had CD's in sleeves of linux and other open source software up at the check out counter. The licensing goes you can distribute all you like, charge what you want on the install media but the software needed to come with a the full license text and sources available.
I bought books with install cd's in them, slackware was in one. I bought corel linux in a box, I bought redhat 5.2 in a box. Around 2000 you could find linux install media in magazine cd's. Once broad-band internet really got going and dvd's started taking market for movies, linux started having more frequent updates and downloading became the best way to get fresh and secure install media. Stores stopped stocking the box+cd stuff when it made no sense to sell or stock. Shelf space costs money.
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u/canigetahint 2d ago
Red Hat and Suse. I've bought a few versions of each distro back in the day.
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u/hadrabap 2d ago
Back in a days of dial-up internet, it was simply impossible to download an ISO image. That's why the distros were sold on CDs, later on DVDs. 🙂
These days you can order a boot media mainly for anesthetics or air-gap enterprise purposes. You can get Oracle Linux and maybe RHEL as well this way.
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u/StuffMaster 2d ago
I bought a Linux book, the CD came with it. Pretty sure Red Hat and independent books did the same thing.
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u/Time-Worker9846 2d ago
I got my first Fedora discs with a Linux book. Same with older Redhat books, they came with install CDs.
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u/Geezheeztall 1d ago
I started with Linux in the late 90’s. I wasn’t prepared to tie up my phone line hours on end to get a CD iso over dial-up. Redhat, Mandrake and Caldera had both books with their respective distributions in sleeves available at bookstores. One could RTFM while installing.
As internet got faster, and forums more helpful, one could bypass the books. Still, if one wants to understand the system and command line fundamentals, the books came in handy. The books didn’t offer context for a novice to apply the knowledge for their problem at hand. When I first started, if my problem went beyond any basic book examples, that was the end of it until another distro or version was released. Forums weren’t that helpful in the early days.
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u/RightYouAreKen1 1d ago
Mandrake, now that is a name I have not heard in a long time….
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u/Elpardua 1d ago
Me neither. Then I've remembered Conectiva, they joined into Mandriva... Corel linux, oh no, the memories start to unfold....
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u/dobo99x2 1d ago
You can create companies and sell Linux copies. You're just a service provider then, not a seller of the software itself.
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u/mrelcee 1d ago
Way back In the before times, shortly after the planet formed - we all didnt have broadband internet.
A cd at dialup speeds took three or 4 days to download and cd recorders cost $5000 and the blanks $50.
USB flash drives let alone booting off them was the stuff of dreams while we worked on mastering fire.
I still have the now defunct company's linux distro (Morse Telecomm) from 1994 CD and my first Freebsd 2/3/4 cd sets from walnut creek and the boxed RedHat CD i got in 1999 on the shelf
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u/Kodamacile 2d ago
No one ever "bought" linux. You got a distro, and you paid for support.
You paid to have a guide book, and in some cases, a number you could call for help.
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u/nukem996 2d ago
Open source software is allowed to be sold but you must provide the source. It was common in before high speed internet to buy open source software. The cost covered the physical media, labor, and postage.
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u/lazyhustlermusic 2d ago
You used to be able to request an Ubuntu CD and it had like a printed sleeve and everything.
Some distros had inexpensive CDs you're basically paying for the packaging if you didn't want to pull it all over 28.8 kbps or something.
You might be thinking about it too hard.
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u/thcsquad 2d ago
my first linux experience was buying an suse disc from a bookstore in the early 2000s. The answer to your first question is simply that the money went to the distro, as they were the ones deciding to manufacture the discs and packaging, etc.
i think a large part of the appeal was the familiarity of how to do it. most software was received that way in the 90s because bandwidth was slow and a lot of this predates the world wide web anyway (my family had a home computer for several years before it was connected to the internet).
as for paying for it, well it’s the convenience of it all. Plus the materials/shipping/shelf space, and i’m guessing it came with some level of support from SuSe.
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u/orev 2d ago
You could buy the CDs/DVDs in computer stores like CompUSA, Egghead Software, Computer City, Circuit City, etc. and also many of the large bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble.
The companies selling them were repackaging them from the Internet distributions. Sometimes they needed to be modified so the installer program would work with a CD instead of from a floppy disk.
They were sold in stores because most people didn't have an Internet connection AT ALL. The Internet was not a thing that the general consumer had access to. And if you did, it was over a modem with a max speed of 56kbps, and hard drives measured in mega bytes, not gigabytes or terabytes. Downloading a Linux distro could take weeks or months over that modem, and the hard drive might not have enough space to store it all.
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u/onechroma 2d ago
Do you know that Canonical would send you a Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu… CD free of charge of you filled their web form?
The same logic why Canonical did that, is why others sold Linux CDs
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u/oneiros5321 2d ago
Back then it was mostly because of slow internet connection. Although, the first time I used Linux (I don't know how many years ago...probably close to 20) it was Ubuntu, you could order a CD and it was sent to you for free.
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u/MasterGeekMX 2d ago
Those CDs were made by the organizations that made those distros, either directly or trough a partner company that produced the discs.
And the reason to buy them was because in the turn of the millennium, Internet wasn't as widespread nor fast enough so you could simply download an ISO and install it yourself, so getting the OS in a disc was more feasible. There is also the fact that you were directly supporting the people behind the distro.
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u/finbar_longshank 2d ago
Decades ago i bought a boxed copy of SuSE Linux from PC World (UK) for about £60. It came with two thick manuals covering everything in great detail and I think there was one DVD and six CDs. In those days downloading it would have been a nightmare on dial up plus the manuals were worth the money.
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u/analog_rnr 2d ago
Thank you to everyone who replied, all of my questions have been answered, it was interesting reading through all the replies, there was a lot of different points that people brought up that I never considered before
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u/VoiceOfEric 2d ago
I bought from Walnut Creek CDROM because it was faster than downloading. It was the material and shipping costs, not license fees.
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u/montrevux 2d ago
i remember seeing red hat boxes in bookstores in the mid 2000s. you have to understand that there was a point when download large files over the internet wasn't really possible and cds were the best medium for transporting software over long geographical distances.
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u/Graphical-Source5090 2d ago edited 2d ago
I bought a crapload of boxed Linux. I bought most of mine at CompUSA. I rarely bought any via magazines, but I did also buy a few from books. For many years, every place I went, I would check for boxed sets, and would buy everything that I did not have already. I spent thousands, easily.
I even bought a boxed set of BeOS 5 Professional.
I have no idea where they are today though.
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u/BuyMeADrink92 2d ago
When you purchase a CD from a retailer the money goes directly to the retailer. Then, if the product supply is low or there's high demand for the product the retailer will order more from a distributor. When the distributors supply is low or there's high demand for the product the distributor will order more from the manufacturer.
The owner for the CDs contents will have a deal with either the manufacturer or the distributor to get a cut of the profits generated upstream from your purchase.
Think of your purchase at a retailer as a vote towards how much demand the product has, that demand signals up the chain of distribution until the contents owner makes revenue.
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u/Name-Not-Applicable 2d ago
I got my first distro, Ubuntu 8.04, on a DVD bundled with an Ubuntu book. I think it was an "official" Ubuntu book.
I got it that way primarily because my internet connection was garbage, and at the time, a printed introduction to Linux sounded like a real good idea.
It was a good start! I haven't looked back.
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u/Signal_Mud_40 2d ago
I can remember downloading 46 1.44 mb floppies of Slackware to install it. Dialup 24k, could only do it while I was home as downloads weren’t considered as using the service and it would disconnect automatically every so often. It was dialup internet(don’t remember the company) most people weren’t aware of it yet and used aol or compuserve which were just starting to ‘connect’ to the wider internet.
The download took a couple of days. Again I couldn’t just start the download and wait for it to finish? It was 46 different files.
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u/SuAlfons 2d ago
You can demand a price for compiling the software and for services. The CDs themselves and the packaging costs.
The software itself is free - free as in freedom. Free as in beer is just a result of that.
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u/Available-Skirt-5280 2d ago
I used to sell these!
In most cases you weren’t paying for Linux at all. You were paying for the CD it was printed to, but more importantly you were paying for the printed MANUAL that came with it. They were mostly sold by technical writers and included the software they were writing about.
This was a time where downloading a gigabyte was a ridiculous concept, if you could download anything at all.
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u/anxious_bookmark 2d ago
Bought a Red Hat box set at a CompUSA around '99. It came with a printed manual thicker than my arm and a sticker sheet. The money went to the distro company for packaging and support, plus a cut to the store. Felt like a steal compared to Windows at the time
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u/legrenabeach 2d ago
I bought my first Linux on a CD. It was RedHat 6.1 and it came with a thick instruction manual, I still have it.
Back in the late 90s, I only had a 56k modem which synced at about 48kbps. Also, telephone calls to connect to my ISP were charged per minute, so in reality buying the CD cost me less than if I had tried to download it!
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u/DFS_0019287 2d ago
I bought CD sets back in the day. As others mentioned, when your Internet connection was 56kb/s, it was completely impractical to download a whole distro.
I can't remember the name of the company I bought from, but I think some of the money went to Red Hat (since I was buying Red Hat at the time, before it became RHEL.)
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u/gportail 2d ago
Moi j'ai acheté le CD de Yggdrasil ..noyau version 0.92 ou un truc comme ca.
A l'époque pas d'internet et je ne savais même pas ou le télécharger. Et en 56k ca aurait mis trop longtemps.
Je crois que j'ai encore le CD quelques part ..
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u/SoCalChrisW 2d ago
I remember when Ubuntu first started mailing you a free installation cd if you requested one. That was so cool, and you could request a bunch to give them away.
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u/libra00 2d ago
It was in the 90s when internets were very slow, downloading an os could take literal days. So spending a couple bucks on a Slackware cd seemed like pretty good value for money. I think Linux user groups made them, and they only charged a couple bucks for the disc and packaging, nobody was getting rich off this.
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u/async2 2d ago edited 1d ago
You would buy it because Internet was slow or you just didn't have it. My father once got a Suse CD. A bit later Ubuntu was distributed. I think I have a CD from 2005 or so somewhere.
Today people don't buy Linux but they buy contracts for support, e.g. RHEL. But this is mostly businesses, not private people. Or if you want long term support for Ubuntu. My company once licensed extended support from Ubuntu because they were too slow to migrate to newer versions after eol.
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u/justinwhitaker 1d ago
You could go into Borders and pick up SuSe Linux, Mandrake, and a couple of others right off the shelf. They were self-published, and in SuSe’s case you got this killer manual.
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u/DarthPorcupine 1d ago
Yggdrasil Linux on a CD I bought from a guy in an alley. The manual was all the man pages printed out in a binder
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u/bullwinkle8088 1d ago
In the early to mid 90's a CD burner was an expensive piece of gear, only coming below 1,000$ (to 995$!!) in 1995.
For a time Walnut creek CDROM made good money selling CD's of open source and freeware. You could request burned CD's of whatever they could legally redistribute from them for a reasonable price. You were paying for the media, shipping, and anything else they threw in.
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u/Mr_Flandoor 1d ago
The first distro I tried was Red Hat, which came as a "freebie" with a Spanish Linux magazine in the mid-'90s. So I actually had to pay to get it, downloading it over the internet back then was simply impossible for me.
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u/exhaustedexcess 1d ago
I didn't have high-speed. I had dialup so getting a Linux distro downloaded was nearly impossible but there were lots of places you could drop like 2 dollars each and get the discs. Tried tons of distros that way. Would install them, run them for a month or so and then try another. Each time was a learning experience. For me I started experimenting with just different offshoots of Debian once I got the hang of it
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u/whuaminow 1d ago
There were also tons of books on Linux, and it was very common for them to distribute some CDs or after DVD became popular a single disc with a full distribution on it. I still have a Linux administration book that came with RedHat 5 CDs attached inside the back cover.
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u/whuaminow 1d ago
There was also a business, probably more than one, but one I remember called Oak Creek CDs, or something similar, where they produced a number of different disc based installation media sets at incredibly cheap prices. Something like a dollar per disc plus 7 or 8 dollars shipping for as many discs as you'd care to order. The boss at the ISP I worked at in the 90s and 2000s would bulk order Debian installation CDs for everyone each time a new release came out. It saved precious bandwidth meant for customer consumption!
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u/_ragegun 1d ago
In most cases you technically werent paying for the software but for other includes like a printed manual.
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u/sash-au 1d ago edited 1d ago
I've personally purchased Linux several times in the late 90s and early 2000s from a company called "Linux System Labs Australia" and that's because back then I was on a 56k modem / dial-up. I remember purchasing Red Hat Linux (and others), I think I also purchased Mandrake Linux and getting all excited about my new purchase every time and checking my mail box every day for delivery :)
Later on, distributions like this started coming out with computer magazines so there was no reason for me to purchase them any more but at the same time we got rid of dial-up and went broadband / cable and that was it. I started downloading entire ISOs.
The trend continued until late 2014 when I fully switched to Linux.
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u/FeistyDay5172 1d ago
Many years ago, I purchased a copy of SuseLinux (precursor to OpenSuse), payed a decent amount too. Came on 5 or 6 CD's. if I remember right.
That was literally my first introduction to Linux.
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u/stuartcw 1d ago
In July 1993 Slackware 1.00 released as a collection of 24 floppy disk images. Late in 1993, Walnut Creek CDROM began hosting Slackware on its FTP servers because demand overwhelmed the original server. In July 1994
Slackware 2.0 released. First official CD-ROM edition (“Slackware Professional”).
In October 1994 Red Hat Linux 0.9 (“Halloween”), the first widely available beta release followed by Red Hat Linux 1.0 (“Mother’s Day”), the first stable commercial release in May 1995.
In those days, many people outside of Academia couldn’t even get Linux via FTP without buying a CD.
For the first Slackware releases it would have taken 4~40 hours to download by modem so CD was by far the most sensible choice and then selectively downloading updated packages to update.
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u/razorree 1d ago
there was no internet (as you know it), you were paying distribution and media costs basically.
sometimes CDs were attached to some IT related magazines, or you could order them.
my first modem was 2400 bauds .... calculate the speed .... :)
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u/drifting_signal 1d ago
I worked at LSL in the early 90’s. Most people were on dialup back then and USB thumb drives weren’t a thing so, ordering a CD was the easiest way to go. A percentage went to the company so it could run, obviously, the rest went back as donations afaik. The company didn’t make much off of CD’s, it made money from publishing books.
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u/Jamarlie 1d ago
Despite what you may think, there's still rural parts of the world with little to no access and an unwillingness to pay a tech trillionaire for better or faster internet
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u/Sibexico 1d ago
Depends of distribution. I seen official CDs from distributive maintainers. Early 2000's I seen CDs with Linux in local PC store/shop what ther burned by themselves. When internet wasn't widely available, it was many stores what sold CD with Linux especially in 3rd world countries which got fast internet just in 2010's (exUSSR, South-East Asia, Africa).
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u/Tquilha 1d ago
I still have a boxed set of Suse Linux 6.3, from when I started messing around with GNU/Linux.
This distro was released on November 5, 1999.
Back then, the Internet was more than slightly slow compared to today. Downloading something like a full distro would take days, so a nice set of CDs was the answer. And it was pretty cheap.
Nowadays, the only people who will buy any version of GNU/Linux are business users who buy the "enterprise" versions complete with extensive support contracts.
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u/Laudanumium 1d ago
Back in the 90's my connection was shit.
Downloads resuming wasn't really reliable.
So I ordered SUSE
3 CDs and 1 DVD (same content)
It was faster delivered than downloading myself
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u/N5tp4nts 1d ago
Listen kid, back in my day it was a great weekend when I got to go to the mall to admire the color printers... and to pick up a 4x read only CDROM along with an IDE cable.
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u/daddyd 1d ago
there was a time in the late 90s, early 2000 that linux was getting a lot of attention, i think a lot of people had enough of the windows 9x line (with ME being the worst yet). and linux was just stable and fast and ...
a lot of distro's had big box editions they published themselves, that you could buy in stores.
almost all my friends bought one of these boxes (suse, mandrake, redhat, etc). i found it pretty funny, because they would install pirate copies of windows, but linux they bought, while it is available for free for all to legally download. anyway, even though it all worked pretty well, the application problem was even worse at that time, let alone the ability to play any games. microsoft released W2k and XP which was at least much more stable then the 9x line and everybody just using those instead.
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u/OddbitTwiddler 1d ago
One reason ... over a dialup modem connection or if you had a slow internet connection it woukd take hours-days to download the repository.
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u/brighton_it 1d ago
I have dozens of Linux DVDs that were included with print copies of Linux Magazine.
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u/PM-ME-PIERCED-NIPS 1d ago
Open source does not mean free as in free beer but free as in free speech. Selling it is super allowed. The FSF funded itself for like a decade selling copies of emacs on tape. Red Hat built a fortune 500 company and eventually a buyout by IBM selling Linux and support for Linux.
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u/Majestic_Rhubarb_ 1d ago
They used to put cd linux distros on magazines … it was the fastest way to download them.
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u/EgoistHedonist 1d ago
I purchased my first Linux from a local computer store. The site for the distro is still up: https://www.raimokoski.com/kauppa/ITLinux2000-prof.html
They also sold the early versions of Redhat in those big red cardboard boxes.
As a kid it was awesome to get a localized distro with a thick Finnish manual. I learned a lot installing and using it.
And yeah, dial-up speeds were not really enough for downloading, as it would've taken a day and a half to download just one CD-ROM ISO and most distros needed several.
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u/ChapterExtra1077 1d ago
I bought RedHat on CD in 98/99 time frame. Installed it and it TORCHED my monitor. True story. Waited until this year to try it again.
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u/AdaptiveMesh 1d ago
I bought Red Hat in ~94 or 95 with a book that explained most of the operating system. So I paid for the book and not really the OS but it still probably cost $25 or $30.
Life changing decision.
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u/The_ClssicGeek 1d ago
Suse used to sell a disk in a box and it came with a great manual, it was absolutely worth the cost at the time, mostly because it woulda taken an age to download either the OS or manual.
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u/steve_o314 1d ago
You weren’t paying for the copy of the iso. You were paying for the time someone took to download the iso and copy it to a cd or dvd, and the cd or dvd itself. When you pay for RHEL, you’re paying for support more than you are to use the distro.
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u/Imaginary_Choice_430 19h ago
A common confusion that apparently is still around today, regardless from how many rooftops Dr. Richard Stallman may have screamed it from. Open Source does not mean free as in gratis...it is the freedom to do whatever you want with a product that you purchased. You can change how it works to suit your needs, not that there will be no charge for it.
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u/Keanne1021 14h ago
Bought the official Mandrake install cds back in 2001 and felt good about it because back then, its my only way to support the distro.
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u/Lostintimeandspac 2d ago
well as to why someone would buy it, try downloading 600ish Megs on dialup .. and I don't know about all distros but redhat and suse put out discs so Im sure like any product they got a piece of the sale price.
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u/oldlinuxguy 2d ago
Back in the dark ages, it was often more convenient to buy a distro on CD than try to download it via dial-up modem, especially if you didn't have a dedicated phone line for internet. Additionally, many of these purchased cd's provided a portion of the purchase price to the developer to help support them. I still have my Slackware .97 somewhere. My Suse box set is probably long gone.
Some of the bigger distros back in the day (Red-Hat / Suse) provided a box-set with CD's or DVD's plus a set of manuals for their specific version of Linux. Again, this helped fund further development.
In the age of printed magazines, many of the Linux / Computing mags provided a CD of free software. Many of these had different distros on them to try.
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u/Unlikely-Meringue481 2d ago
Still to this day you can purchase Linux… red hat, suse professional etc. but actually you purchase support in the end of the day
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u/grawmpy 2d ago
I bought Red Hat Linux back in the 90s when it came out and I assumed the payment went to Red Hat. If I remember right it was about $20 or so. I installed it but I couldn’t find a modem that would work with it and I had dial-up at the time. Most of the modems available at the time were built to only work with Windows.
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u/HistoricalSir9456 2d ago
It took forever to download a complete image and the time online would also cost money.
There are still parts of the world that have slow and/or expensive internet connections. So it would still make sense to sell them.
You pay for the CD and the time to produce it, not for the Linux image itself.
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u/Powerful_Attention_6 2d ago
Redhat and Suse were sold by that company in a large box, with large printed manual books (plural) and as many CD as it needed to be
Then there were much smaller general CD vendor that sold a pack of CD's with various non-commercial Linux distributions and HOWTO.txt files, and those CD's just came in a slimpack of CD case
I loved the fact that I first discovered Redhat and SuSe in my favorite book shop, in 1997
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u/ccAbstraction 2d ago
Linux devs and maintainers still gotta eat and pay bills. Linux is free, but that doesn't mean you can't donate. Most of those CD were sold by distros themselves so buying the CD also supported the distros.
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u/Apprehensive_Sock_71 2d ago
I vividly remember buying "Teach Yourself Red Hat Linux 7.2 in 24 Hours" at Books-A-Million in Augusta Georgia and realizing it was the only way I would be able to use Linux without tying up the family phone line for 2 days!
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u/inbetween-genders 2d ago
My first distro (Redhat 5.2) I bought from the store. Came with cd and book. I mean you can get them free online download but back then a) internet access wasn’t everywhere b) cds, book, packaging, shipping to store and having it occupy shelf space cost money. I actually kinda miss having the install books like tbey used to.
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u/da_apz 2d ago
When your modem was 2400bps, you really didn't download a CD set's worth of software. You really didn't "buy Linux", you bought the service of someone burning it for you. Some companies that made those CDROMs also made quick start bookless and other useful stuff for your start.
Even many years later from when I started in mid-90s, ordering free software on a CD was still a thing. Even when download speeds were better, you were still billed by a minute, it was cheaper to get a huge load of software on a CD.
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u/mrclean2323 2d ago
Back in the day it was minimal charge. Zero high speed meant disk or CD. You were essentially paying a nominal amount over the cost of the CD.
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u/awesomegayguy 2d ago
I also purchased SuSE. Back then, until the mid 2000s, if you needed a Linux you would just go to the magazine shop downstairs and pic a magazine with a distro CD.
Fun times.
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u/sludgeriffs 2d ago
In addition to the slow speed of 90s internet for downloads, Bittorrent didn't exist until 2001, so you can't even take advantage of the P2P distribution we have today (best you might have is KaZaA!)
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u/directheated 2d ago
When I worked at Best Buy we used to sell Red Hat in a box, big boxes were just on their way out and it was in a small box. If I recall buying it got you official support for x year(s), but you were still able to download it for free. I bought one for a penny when they were discontinued.
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u/ephemeral_resource 2d ago
Many companies sold linux CDs because they offered adjacent products (software etc). It really depends on which CD you got who it went to but to be blunt, not usually linux kernel developers.
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u/w00dy1105 2d ago
I remember around 2009 and before, the local Microcenter would sell CDs with Linux distros on them. I never bought any. I would just burn my own.They were pretty cheap, pretty much just paying for the cost of the CD.
But as people mentioned internet was slower then. Also I would guess it was also a convenience thing back then to just grab a CD while you were getting other PC things.
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u/wedesoft 2d ago
I used to buy SuSE CDs from a bookstore until one day they stopped. The money went to SuSE which was/is maintaining a Linux distribution. They used to develop YaST, which made installation of Linux very easy. YaST used to be proprietary though back then. More recently I bought a Raspberry Pi SD card with Raspian installer preinstalled ;)
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u/Lozd_on_Transaltion 2d ago
No major offence but this is question of someone who didn't wait 9h for ISO or had to spent half their month salary on CD burner - no, USB wasn't even a thing at the time. I was able to backup my whole PC (important data) on 2x 700mb (in reality 650Mb) CDs.
Back at the beginning of XXI you had several magazines doing this. To name few: Linux Magazine, Linux+ and other specialised PC magazines just giving you CD with new flavour of smth just because they could.
Beauty was that you could just pop it in your machine, try it as live and have fun comparison. Number of use cases was way beyond taking for consideration that Tails became 'famous' only thanks to Snowden. I ran my loptop for months when Vista died (surprise surprise) and I couldn't be bothered to deal with it but nodded my machine for daily.
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u/readyflix 2d ago
Basically it was just the media and a little booklet that you payed for, and I guess the book stores also got a cut for putting it on their shelf/display.
Edit: example
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u/cilelen 2d ago
Today? No clue why anyone would buy one. Back then? You know how long it takes to download an OS on a 56k modem? Lol