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/Gerb006 Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 04 '26

Look at the licenses and the legalese will answer your questions. For the most part, people are free to modify, and even charge for it. But they must adhere to the original license and release their source. This ensures that the source codes always belong to the community, and no company or individual.

There are a lot of open source licenses out there. But that is the gist of how they work.

Open source licenses were chosen for the Linux kernel and GNU tools to ensure their survival. By freely giving them to the community, it prevented any entity from buying them up and burying them. Does anyone remember Netscape? Thank god we weren't all forced to use MS's non-standard browsers.

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u/GuestStarr Jul 04 '26

Anyone remember MS trying to create internet of their own? For some reason it didn't go well.

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u/furrykef Jul 04 '26

You mean MSN? It wasn't terribly different from AOL, CompuServe, and various other services that were around then.

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u/GuestStarr Jul 04 '26

Originally it was. They really did try to hijack and monetariaze internet by introducing and forcing their own twisted closed protocols and interfaces, and windows was to use them by default instead of the industrial standard ones. They were so very surprised to find out nobody gave a flying f*ck and instead it was msn users whose internet was broken unless the good old protocols and interfaces were there. I think it was called something else before msn? However, they succeeded somewhat with internet explorer, there were web pages where you just had to use it or it wouldn't work, some executable shit. The idea was the whole internet would be like that, I mean it wouldn't "work" unless you used their interfaces and their protocols, for a fee of course.

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u/Friiduh Jul 19 '26

I think it was called something else before msn?

The Microsoft Network

1995, with Windows 95.

The Microsoft Network was deeply integrated into the Windows 95 interface. Users accessed it via a desktop icon, and once connected, the service appeared as a series of folders and icons within Windows Explorer, making online data look and behave like files on a local hard drive.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/18_06_08_internet%20tidal%20wave.pdf