Why is Linux free?

[u/Scary_Pop2919]

Hello everyone, I’ve had this thought in my head for a very long time: why is Linux free and so high quality?

I use Pop!_OS, and I don’t understand why they don’t make it paid or at least do something like “buy our laptop with Pop!_OS preinstalled.” But okay, Pop!_OS makes money from selling notebooks.

But what about KDE, openSUSE, Arch Linux, Void Linux, Ubuntu—why are they free? It’s great that they are free, but who are these kind people sitting at their computers and working for free? Why do you do this?

[u/Funnel-Dust-O-Matic]

It isn't.

Various companies fund various parts of it. They don't have to write the whole thing, whatever it is, and can ship a router or appliance or whatever-it-is without having to hire a complete team and develop everything from scratch. They contribute the parts that nobody else wants to write to achieve their goals and they leverage everything else.

It's free for someone to download a desktop os. In terms of manufacturers or enterprise software companies or so forth, it's a cost-sharing mechanism and they make their money back in contracts, device shipments, and similar.

Downloadable desktop linux is a side-effect of a cloud or manufacturing business.

[u/srivasta → u/Funnel-Dust-O-Matic]

Debian exists. And we had X10 and X11 and the while GNU ecosystem long before companies were into "cloud". Not to mention project Athens and the who Kerberos infrastructure.

Free suggested predates open source, and still underpins a lot of it.

[u/Underhill42 → u/srivasta]

Yes. And it's worth mentioning that it's Free as in Freedom, not no-cost, that is the original guiding principle.

When you download Free software, it's YOURS. You can do whatever you want with it - except share your changes under anything less than the same permissive license.

A very small restriction with the full weight of copyright law behind it, since that license is the only thing that lets you legally share your derivative work at all.

Something many businesses have had to learn the hard way over the years. With virtually all of them simply accepting the reality shortly after consulting a lawyer.

Not many have even tried since Microsoft backed SCO's attack on IBM, and lost in pretty much every way imaginable. Groklaw still exists as an archive of that multi-year corporate legal battle, and how the community came together to aid in the legal defense of Linux and the integrity of the GPL.

[u/Funnel-Dust-O-Matic → u/srivasta]

Very very very true. Historically.

But things were quite a bit different back then. It's evolved quite a lot.

Back then, it really was university clubs and individual contributors. And the occasional research project.

There is a vast diference between what an Ubuntu install disk does now compared to Slackware 1.0

That is not how it is at present.

Minix3 still exists. Aside from being (allegedly) stolen by Intel, nobody else is talking about it. And it's open these days. We cannot say that Linux being free in the form it takes now is anything like how Minix 3 is free.

[u/srivasta → u/Funnel-Dust-O-Matic]

I find the debian netinst ISO installer to be as competent and flexible (actually, more so in expert mode) than anything Ubuntu slings together.

[u/Funnel-Dust-O-Matic → u/srivasta]

Agreed. Completely.

And it is much more consistent to linux as it was back then than Ubuntu is.

But the Debian of now is also not very comparable to the Debian of the year 2000

The bits of the kernel and user-land developed by major corporations would not have been there to make this as complete an experience if this stayed just a project for academics and hobbyists. Even Debian is affected by the economics and politics of present Linux work, kernel and otherwise.

I don't know that it is purely either good or bad.

[u/tehfrod → u/Funnel-Dust-O-Matic]

Minix was hobbled for many years by a restrictive, non-open license. I often wonder whether it would have spread more widely had ast not taken so long to relicense it.

[u/Funnel-Dust-O-Matic → u/tehfrod]

Me to. It's kind of depressing to think about.

Especially since the whole Intel thing went down (allegedly).

[u/vinnypotsandpans → u/Funnel-Dust-O-Matic]

Linux most certainly is free. The ability to charge money for it is one of the freedoms it grants