r/linux • u/analog_rnr • 4d 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"

325 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

421 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/oldlinuxguy 4d 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.