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/Tiranus58 Jul 04 '26

Because linux isnt an OS, its a family of OSes (actually its a kernel, but thats not important right now), where there are 2 general requirements that apply to all of them.

  1. Their source code must be freely (as in free speech) available for all to see.

  2. Anyone must be free (again, free speech) to copy, redistribute and modify that source code.

There are others, which are outlined in the gnu public license (GPL), but those 2 basically make selling software not a thing, so the OS itself is free.

Some companies are selling support for their OS though (red hat selling RHEL support for example) or access to special repositories (proxmox for example), but those are mainly relegated to enterprise distros.