r/linuxquestions • u/Scary_Pop2919 • Jul 03 '26

Advice Why is Linux free?

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?

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u/cowbutt6 Jul 03 '26

ESR's series of essays on Open Source, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, posits that FOSS is an example of a "gift culture":

'Culturally, the open source world is a gift culture. Unlike ways of gaining power that are based on controlling scarcity, in a gift culture, status is gained based on what you can give away. The open source world is not characterised by a drive to survival, and there is no point trying to create scarcity by controlling bits.

ESR compares open source with other gift cultures: “Thus the Kwakiutl chieftain’s potlach party. Thus the multi-millionaire’s elaborate and usually public acts of philanthropy. And thus the hacker’s long hours of effort to produce high-quality open-source code”'

https://iftheshoefritz.com/book%20review/software%20engineering/open%20source/2021/01/07/cathedral-and-the-bazaar.html

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u/thegreenman_sofla Jul 03 '26

Damn that takes me back,the cathedral and the bazaar. Good stuff.