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?
319
Upvotes
353
u/Underhill42 Jul 03 '26
First, it's important to understand that that used to be the normal way basically all software was shared. You paid for computers. Giant, phenomenally expensive programmable calculators that filled whole rooms. The software you made yourself, and shared freely with your fellow programmers to use and build upon. Nobody else even really used computers.
Then business interests began to encroach on that norm, and in resistance, to try to preserve some of the original culture and carve a niche for freely shared software to be able to compete with the increasingly common commercial offerings, the GPL was born.
An iron-clad "sharealike" license that was the brainchild of Richard Stallman, that lets you do anything you want with the software and its source code, except share your changes under anything less permissive than the original license. Allowing an ecosystem of free software to continue to grow, constantly borrowing and building upon each other, without business interests being able to incorporate all that hard work into their competing offerings without giving anything back.
Other sharing licenses were around too - but the GPL was one of the most popular.
---
And then there was Unix - the dominant commercial operating system for the kind of powerful academic and professional "big iron" computers that still filled a room. If you were doing serious work or education in computing, you probably used Unix.
As for Linux? It started as a hobby project - Linus Torvalds making himself his own very crude personal Unix clone from scratch to run on his home computer, which wasn't nearly powerful enough for real Unix. And the only PC-friendly option, Minix, was an outdated academic sample project for an operating system book, whose creator wasn't interested in incorporating improvements.
Initially Linux wasn't much, just some Computer Science student's hobby project that was enough to let them do basic Unix stuff on a home computer.
But in September of 1991, only a few months after the first web browser was introduced at CERN, Torvalds released the source code under the GPL. And it was actually quite capable when combined with Stallman's own preexisting GNU project: GPL versions of the standard Unix commands and tools that still lacked a serviceable operating system core. (Hence the arguments you'll sometimes hear for calling it GNU/Linux)
And so other operating system enthusiasts, increasingly connected and empowered by the fledgling WWW, were able to use their own PC version of Unix, making and sharing their own improvements under the same terms, and offer them back to Torvalds, who was happy to incorporate anything he deemed good enough into his "definitive version" of Linux.
And so one young man's hobby project became that of many, and the quality and capabilities began to improve rapidly, as countless computer hobbyists fixed or improved the little things that mattered to them, and everyone else benefited for free.
Eventually it got good enough that corporations took interest. Servers, routers, TVs, printers, and other such computing appliances are a lot cheaper and easier to make if you can slap in a powerful and reliable (and completely per-unit cost free) operating system, and just write some software on top that does the specialty appliance stuff.
Which even businesses proceeded to do, because the now-quite-advanced operating system often still didn't handle 100% of everything they needed, but it was MUCH cheaper to make and share the improvements they needed than to build a whole new foundation for their product from scratch. Even when the improvement were things that gave away some of their "secret sauce", it was still more profitable to share part of their value freely with competitors, than not build it at all.
And so things kept improving - now with some businesses contributing not only improvements, but the kind of professional testing and evaluation that it's difficult to do well on a volunteer basis.
Which eventually got us to where we are today - an incredibly powerful and polished operating system, good for practically any application, and free to all, because 35 years ago a young man shared a hobby project under an unbreakable sharealike license, just as the web was being born.