So, the next logical question, is "Why, and How Can Linux be Free?" or "If it's Free, how can it be any good?" You get what you pay for, right?
There are very good reasons. Linux kernel was written by Linus Torvalds, as an undergraduate project at the University of Helsinki, to provide a from-scratch functional equivalence of the UNIX operating system. See
WikipediaSince then, Linux has become the operating system of the Internet backbone, Huge Corporations, Universities, and Governments. There are companies that put billions into Linux software development and maintenance. Red Hat, for example, provides Enterprise-level software support to corporate Linux users, for a lofty price.
Torvalds, however, always, by design and licensing principle, insisted that the Linux kernel itself always be freely available to the world, under the GNU General Public License. Anyone developing non-proprietary improvements to the Linux kernel must make their efforts freely available to the community.
Chances are, the next web page you click on will be delivered to you from a Linux server. Google runs Linux servers, and Linux software. Android is Linux. The U.S. Department of Defence runs Linux. Windows is just too flakey for this mission-critical stuff.
But, I kinda skipped a step. About 6 years before the time Linus released the first version of Linux, Richard Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote the GNU General Public License. Linus used the GNU development tools to create Linux around 1991.
See
WikipediaThe GNU General Public License is why we have so much fabulous free software to run under Linux. Much of it written as dissertations by Ph.D. candidates, undergraduate projects, or simply by dedicated and talented code-hackers. And some written by hugely funded corporate programming teams, so a mega-corp could have the software it needed/wanted, knowing that it had to be released freely to the public under the GPL..
Much of it better than the software written by Micro$oft employees in office cubicles in Redmond, Wa. for sale to the gullible public and small business.
For more background, there are some very informative talks by both Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman on YouTube.
The above article was written "off the top of my head", late at night, without a lot of rigorous fact checking, so there may be minor factual/historical errors. It also contains subjective personal opinion which should be interpreted as such. That is left as an exercise for the student.
*Edited to correct a major historical error in the original post.
*Second edit, to correct another embarrassing factual error.
Up next: a discussion about trying out a "Linux Distribution"