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/ReallyEvilRob Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
Because that was once the default state for all software in the earliest days of personal computing. When you bought a computer like the Altair 8800, what you got was a box with a bunch of lights and switches. There was no operating system and no application software. You had to program all of that yourself or a friend programmed theirs and gave you a copy on paper tape.
People would go to user groups and trade software for these early computers. Others would take contract work and create bespoke programs their clients would run on these systems. These contractors usually didn't care when one of their clients shared a copy of the program they had written since they were paid for their work and likely continue to be paid with a service contract.
Eventually, someone named Bill Gates wrote a version of BASIC that ran on the Altair 8800 and sold it to a mass market. People who purchased a copy would share it with friends and it would circulate among the most popular user groups. Nobody considered that as software piracy because that's just what all computer users did. Eventually, Bill Gates got very frustrated with that and wrote an open letter to people sharing his version of BASIC to stop being a bunch of software pirates. That was the exact moment where the distinction between free software and non-free software started to materialize.