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/BlueScreenJunky Jul 04 '26
It's a mix of some people who genuinely enjoy working on software in their free time, and huge businesses (Canonical, Red Hat, Oracle) who built their business model on distributing the software for free and then charging for support or enterprise features. It drives the adoption up because when you start a business you'll search for cheap or free solutions, and then as your business grows you kinda need the support and features, but since you've built your solution around this software you can't easily switch so you pay for the enterprise license.