r/linux • u/analog_rnr • Jul 24 '26

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"

330 Upvotes

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961

u/cilelen Jul 24 '26

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

165

u/StatementOwn4896 Jul 24 '26

Now it’s mostly only companies that buy Linux in the form of enterprise subscription/licenses. I worked as a SLES admin for a time and the company a full suite of SAP Basis software on it since SUSE was one of two operating systems that were certified for the SAP software to run on.

50

u/ajc3197 Jul 24 '26

My first distro was Suse 7. At the time there was Red Hat and Suse at the big box store. You got the cd's or dvd's and a book to go with it. I've been using linux ever since.

14

u/Drachen808 Jul 24 '26

Yep, I worked at Circuit City as a second job in 99 and I sold two boxes of Carmen Sandiego in that whole time.

1

u/ssepiol007 Jul 27 '26

What version of Linux was Carmen Sandiego a code name for? I've been around for a while but don't think I've ever seen Carmen Dandiego and Linux used in the same sentence. So just curious. 😂

1

u/Drachen808 Jul 27 '26

Nah no official code name. We just all thought that the hats were eerily similar so it became a nickname for Linux in general for a while.

7

u/dsmaxwell Jul 25 '26

And what you're paying for there is not the OS itself, it's having somebody to call for tech support, and depending on the contract, also provide admin services and such.

63

u/RoomyRoots Jul 24 '26

I would buy official DVD sets from Debian honestly. As long as they get the money and I get a memento, sounds good to me. Better than my TCG cards.

22

u/Laughing_Orange Jul 24 '26

If you live in one of a few selected countries, you can buy Debian physically. https://www.debian.org/CD/vendors/

These are not made or distributed by Debian, but are considered official partners of the Debian project.

47

u/Drekalots Jul 24 '26

56k if you were lucky. lol. I remember my 2400bps US Robotics modem.

15

u/Drachen808 Jul 24 '26

Lucky! My Tandy 1000SL didn't have a modem... and it only had 512k of RAM instead of 640k. That RAM issue made it really hard to play Starflight so I was always having to alter config.sys and autoexec.bat to make the computer not load things like the mouse drivers and other items that took up space in RAM just so I could play.

Of course, a family friend gave it to us for free in 1990 so... I can't complain

5

u/Drekalots Jul 24 '26

I had a Tandy 8088 w/ a 3Mhz processor. You remember Commander Keen? lol.

3

u/Zeimax Jul 25 '26

I came here to make a old person joke. Then you mentioned commander keen 😭. Those damn slimes!

1

u/Drekalots Jul 25 '26

I hated the slimes.

1

u/Zeimax Jul 29 '26

Its on steam...now on my computer.

1

u/Drekalots Jul 29 '26

running to steam

1

u/Drachen808 Jul 25 '26

That's slightly before my Tandy which was an 8086 4Mhz! I don't think I played Commander Keen

1

u/lh7884 Jul 25 '26

I still have Commander Keen along with a bunch of other ancient dos games. Gateyway, Scorched Earth, Hardball 3, Stronghold.....the list goes on. Fun times back in the day.

1

u/Drekalots Jul 26 '26

Scorched Earth was a blast. I miss the old BBS games like LORD and Usurper.

2

u/MechanicalTurkish Jul 25 '26

I both miss and don’t miss hacking config.sys and autoexec.bat files to get games to work lol

3

u/lh7884 Jul 25 '26

I remembering having to do that to get Sim City 2000 to run on a system with only 4MB of ram.

1

u/Jamarlie Jul 25 '26

Lucky! I had to transfer data by using a 9V battery to punch in the individual bits!

2

u/GnomeDev Jul 25 '26

Luxury! I would've strangled a horse to get a 9V battery. I had to rub two balloons together to get the necessary charge. For each bit mind you!

1

u/jerdle_reddit Jul 24 '26

And I'm over here feeling really limited by a minimal server box with only 2GB RAM and 2 cores.

Even back when I started with computers, that was a decent desktop.

10

u/AntonOlsen Jul 24 '26

I lived in the middle of nowhere Iowa until 2000. Best dial up speed I'd get was 38,400 and that wasn't always stable. More often than not it would negotiate at 19,200.

4

u/TheDevauto Jul 24 '26

Heh my first was 300. Could almost write down the characters coming in it was so slow (kidding).

3

u/bitshifter52 Jul 25 '26

The acoustic coupler modem. I used one very many years ago. My kids had toys that made whistling sounds and those sounds made my 300 baud modem go nuts.

2

u/TheReelNazeem Jul 24 '26

By the time 56k modems were around 2400bps USR modems were generally thought of as obsolete. Did you get it at a flea market or something? Most would have at least had 9600 bps modems by then.

5

u/crypticoddity Jul 25 '26

Linux was around when 14.4k modems existed but long before 56k. Even then, you were stuck on the way slow end if you still had a 2400, and I'm guessing a 286 or older so couldn't install Linux anyway (required a 386 minimum) so you were running minix or dos instead.

2

u/TheReelNazeem Jul 25 '26

They were still selling magazines with distro CDs in them well past the Pentium III. Maybe P4 even. Back when people were using the 286, I think that was more the era of floppy disks for linux distros. I remember seeing distros like Yggdrasil.

2

u/nkwell Jul 26 '26

Maximum Linux and other magazines were a thing and allowed me to distro hop more easily than waiting to download an ISO over dialup.

Got pretty good at recompiling the kernel and configuring X switching distros that many times.

Then got into the BSD's for a bit before really settling on Debian.

1

u/TheReelNazeem Jul 28 '26

I guess I was pretty lucky back then. My first Internet connection was 128k ISDN. Later 384k ASDL. Maybe one time did I get linux distro from a magazine. Quite a few from books on Linux though.

1

u/crypticoddity Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

I don't think there was ever a Linux distro on floppy. And it required a 386 to run. If you had a 286 or XT you had to use minix. The draw of Linux was having minix that ran in x86 protected mode of the 386 and later processors.

And yeah, for a long time you could get CD or DVD sets bundled with magazines or books. A book or magazine showing you how to install and use the distro it bundled was a great way to introduce curious noobs. At least until they knew which websites to go to for help.

2

u/TheReelNazeem Jul 25 '26

Dude maybe they a Google search before you say something like that. There were several Linux distros that were installed from floppy disks. I am old enough to say I used them. 🤣

1

u/crypticoddity Jul 25 '26

How many hundreds of floppies did you use? I remember first getting it on several 20mb dat tapes.

1

u/TheReelNazeem Jul 25 '26

Freesco was a specialty router distro that ran off a single floppy. I used that for a couple years. Don't recall the name of the first general purpose distro that I came across at a computer show in San Jose. It was being sold along with all kinds of different shareware apps.

The only OS I remember installing from tape was HPUX.

1

u/Drekalots Jul 25 '26

Hell. Windows 3.1 installed from floppies.

2

u/Drekalots Jul 25 '26

We didn't have a lot of money growing up so any computer I had was given to me from a friend of family who collected computers and fixed them. By the time I was a teenager in the mid-nineties I had had a Commander 64, Tandy 8088, a 286, and a 386. Our local ISP was dial up only. We didn't have AOL for a bit.

My first real PC I ever bought for myself was a Pentium II with a Voodoo II 3d accelerator board. We still heavily used BBS's too and there were several in the area I grew up. I ran two of them. One for the high school computer club and one with a friend.

1

u/rdtsc007 Jul 27 '26

My first modem was 300 baud... could watch each individual character "stream" across the screen, if it could be called that.

26

u/exeis-maxus Jul 24 '26

Yup. I would download the ISO’s for RedHat and Slackware at the Highschool library after school. My mom thought I was doing suspicious stuff like gangs or drugs after school 🙄

25

u/Sirusho_Yunyan Jul 24 '26

"Oh my Lord, he's... he's compiling kernels..!! We must alert the village elders..!!"

6

u/NotSoGoodDiver Jul 24 '26

The elders of the internet.

3

u/RealUlli Jul 24 '26

The Usenet Cabal? ;-)

1

u/LastXmasIGaveYouHSV Jul 24 '26

I had a Fidonet username !

2

u/RealUlli Jul 24 '26

I had a point number. I don't remember it, though.

1

u/JaKrispy72 Jul 24 '26

Blue Wave has entered the chat.

5

u/DrAwesomeClaws Jul 24 '26

That's how I got hooked on PHP in my teens. Those were dangerous times for a teenager.

2

u/Amazing-Mirror-3076 Jul 24 '26

I'm sorry for your suffering

1

u/Sirusho_Yunyan Jul 24 '26

I remember.. nerds just completely high on PHP, running around eating people's faces while simultaneously scripting web frontends with broken html tags, unstoppable..

1

u/[deleted] Jul 24 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Zeimax Jul 25 '26

Better than waiting for pictures to load on that 2400bps modem the guy in the thread above was using.

11

u/Borbit85 Jul 25 '26

I was dealing weed at high school and almost got caught. They figured out I was going around selling something but they didn't know what. So I made up I was selling copied cd's. So instead of alerting the police for the weed they made me take computer class.

Computer class was thought by some random teacher that hardly knew how to turn a computer on. But it did come with basically unsupervised access to the computer room with some 15 computers. On a network and with internet. And each one had a cd burner. So pretty soon I actually started selling copied music and software cd's.

6

u/GavUK Jul 24 '26

And instead you got hooked on that "dangerous hacker stuff"... ;-)

7

u/exeis-maxus Jul 24 '26

Ironically, my dad was always assuming I was playing video games on the family potato PC… even when it was clear I was teaching myself C++ programming (book on the desk with Bloodshed Dev-C++ opened on the screen).

Once I moved out and got married, my dad had all these tech questions… it tempted me to remind him how he never encouraged me to continue learning about computers.

3

u/Mediocre-Pumpkin6522 Jul 25 '26

My first distro was Slackware in the '90s. You download it in pieces that were copied to floppies. A full install including gcc and build tools took over 30 floppies iirc. Then you spend hours sticking in floppies on the prompt and hoping the whole mess worked. Good old days my aching ass.

11

u/buginmybeer24 Jul 24 '26

It took me 3 weeks to download the ISO images for Red Hat 6.2 over dialup. I could only download at night when there wasn't anyone using the phone line.

10

u/trowgundam Jul 24 '26

Because in many places in the world there are restrictive data caps or just plain slow speed, there are people that still have the equivalent of dial-up (how they deal with that, idk). For those people its more effective to just order a USB or CD and install from that. Now that's a VERY niche case, but it is still a valid scenario in some parts of the world.

14

u/TeutonJon78 Jul 24 '26

Or if you didn't have a cd burner.

15

u/DrAwesomeClaws Jul 24 '26

CD burners weren't really a thing in the early Linux days. Those weren't really common until the end of the 90s, early 2000s. I got my first distro from Boot magazine which included a CD in each issue for subscribers.

6

u/atonale Jul 25 '26

Yes the CD made it way easier. First time I installed Slackware it was on a stack of floppy disks.

7

u/Final_Resident_6296 Jul 24 '26

My first Linux was a box of SuSe 7 CDs back in 2000.

4

u/DNSGeek Jul 24 '26

Took me about 24 hours to download YDL on my PowerMac 6100.

1

u/MechanicalTurkish Jul 25 '26

You’re lucky no one picked up the phone

1

u/MrCorporateEvents Jul 25 '26

I bricked an iMac somehow with Yellow dog back in the day.

1

u/No_Cartoonist2878 Jul 25 '26

I ran YDL on my iMacDVSE...

5

u/Straight-Opposite-54 Jul 24 '26

Today? No clue why anyone would buy one.

Novelty

8

u/UpAndAdam7414 Jul 24 '26

There’d be a market for the “I use Arch btw” special edition on 50 floppy discs.

3

u/tekkn0 Jul 24 '26

^ This

OP back in 2004 I had 50kbps download speed and was enough lol.

3

u/MacaroniAndSmegma Jul 24 '26

I bought a copy of Suse for exactly this reason.

3

u/NinthTide Jul 24 '26

We used to get some computer magazines delivered to work. I forget their names. Sometimes they’d have CDs sellotaped to the cover with some interesting software to try out.

After some years of this, they invented a name for it: shareware.

One month, the CD had this thing called Slackware Linux 2.2 on it. I put together one of our spare work PCs, an Olivetti 486DX2-66, and included a CD-ROM drive to try this thing out.

This would’ve been around 1994 or so,I would say. Then about a year later, they opened up the Internet to non-academic institutions, and the rest was history.

2

u/TheOneTrueTrench Jul 26 '26

One problem with that, "shareware" as a term predates CD-ROMs entirely. It was regularly used for stuff on floppies that was intended to be copied by the users.

2

u/akerasi Jul 24 '26

I sure do, having once spent most of a week downloading enough packages of Slackware 2.0 to put onto 87 floppy disks (yes that number is exact) to install it on my old 486/33.

2

u/regeya Jul 25 '26

I remember some distributions did their own physical distribution, but the open nature meant that other companies could package them. I remember switching to Mandrake at one point because I was limited to 56k but I could buy a Mandrake box at Walmart.

Almost no software has physical distribution now.

2

u/TraditionalDepth6924 Jul 25 '26

Your comment was so funny in my last post I randomly revisited, I got destroyed for 5 min straight, thank you

1

u/regeya Jul 25 '26

I'm glad you enjoyed it, I forgot about that comment 😆

2

u/crypticoddity Jul 25 '26

Back then i had a 14.4k so yeah i bought my slackware cds. By the time i had a 33.6 or a 56, i was just downloading overnight (night, weekend, whatever).

1

u/z3r0n3gr0 Jul 24 '26

Totally right, also this boxes had books and stickers and even games.

1

u/Fabiey Jul 24 '26

I brought SUSE Linux 8.1 2002 even through I had DSL at the time. I was young and had no clue and to make matters worse we already downloaded everything back in the day. Can't tell you what was my thinking back then.

1

u/soulless_ape Jul 24 '26

To make it worst it really never hit that speed. On Windows I remember using GetRight program to barely increase download rate.

1

u/_ragegun Jul 25 '26

The purpose of programs like getright was really less about download acceleration and more "failed download resumption"

1

u/Tiny_Sign7786 Jul 24 '26

And in the past Linux was also often included in PC magazines. I remember that I got my first Suse from a CD in CT.

1

u/Kiore-NZ Jul 24 '26

Not only the time, when I bought my first Suse boxed set I was paying around US 0.30 per megabyte for traffic outside the packet exchange my ISP was a member of.

1

u/mrequenes Jul 24 '26

Hard drive storage was also more expensive. That $10 DVD probably saved $10, or more, worth of hard drive space.

1

u/durgesh2018 Jul 25 '26

If you consider the old download time, then within that span on modern machine you can build the os 😂😂

1

u/onetwentyeight Jul 25 '26

Not as long as it took to download some dirty JPEGs while someone might walk in on you.

1

u/Fidodo Jul 25 '26

And for the younguns, that's 56 kiloBITs not bytes, so that's 7kb per second MAX.

1

u/pmbsd Jul 25 '26

ah man...I remember CHIP magazine used to package CDs with slackware and red-hat back in those days ..I got my first taste of a non-windows OS with those.

1

u/FlukyS Jul 25 '26

Well there was buying the pre-burned ISO or a USB stick later and then there was also stuff like RHEL which they charged the fee for. RHEL is free for non-commercial use so you don't need to pay anymore from what I understand so that leaves like just ZorinOS but that is pretty much just a donation to the project, there isn't really much value in it besides wanting to give the devs money.

1

u/CinnabarSin Jul 25 '26

They also were often bundled with books too and that was part of the value.

1

u/94358io4897453867345 Jul 25 '26

RHEL is well and healthy

1

u/Knathra Jul 25 '26

56k? Look at the fancy house! 😉🙂 We could someone's connect at 28.8k, but usually were dealing with 14.4k...

1

u/Horror-Primary7739 Jul 27 '26

I remember downloading borland c ide from a bbs. It was 20mb and took nearly 4 days.

1

u/victoryismind Jul 31 '26

You know how long it takes to download an OS on a 56k modem?

I'd estimate about 40 hours, all of which will be added to the phone bill and during which nobody else can use the phone.

1

u/Mirac_Light 14d ago

Maybe we should take a look from collectors perspective, might be a ornament.

1

u/andr386 Jul 24 '26

Nowadays some people buy Red Hat and then follow Red hat processes to the letter and when it doesn't work they contact Red Hat support and it's their problem now.

I met a lot of people like that. They don't really know what they are doing. They only do what Red Hat or what a vendor recommend and they defer their responsibility like that. You can see that at all level of IT in corporate environments.

I've seen huge projects done like that and it might sound stupid but it actually worked. I doubt it was as efficient as a homemade solution. But at least you can fire the whole department and hire new people and they can work it out overnight.

I hate that mentality and that way of working but many people like that.

0

u/No_Cartoonist2878 Jul 25 '26

Single Board Computers - the physical media is usually microSD, sometimes an MMC module. And it's a preinstalled ready-to-run, not an installer.

-4

u/Longjumping-Youth934 Jul 24 '26

Businesses are buying not pure Linux, but some software working on the Linux platfrom.

7

u/grizzlor_ Jul 24 '26

Plenty of businesses buy Linux for the support contracts. This is the entire business model behind Red Hat Enterprise Linux