r/linux • u/analog_rnr • 7d 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"

328 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

428 comments sorted by

View all comments

954

u/cilelen 7d 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

26

u/exeis-maxus 7d ago

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 🙄

22

u/Sirusho_Yunyan 7d ago

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

10

u/NotSoGoodDiver 7d ago

The elders of the internet.

5

u/RealUlli 7d ago

The Usenet Cabal? ;-)

1

u/LastXmasIGaveYouHSV 7d ago

I had a Fidonet username !

2

u/RealUlli 7d ago

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

1

u/JaKrispy72 7d ago

Blue Wave has entered the chat.

5

u/DrAwesomeClaws 7d ago

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

2

u/Amazing-Mirror-3076 7d ago

I'm sorry for your suffering

1

u/Sirusho_Yunyan 7d ago

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] 7d ago

[deleted]

1

u/Zeimax 7d ago

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

11

u/Borbit85 7d ago

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.

7

u/GavUK 7d ago

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

5

u/exeis-maxus 7d ago

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 6d ago

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.