I have started using Linux recently and have been enjoying the open-source nature of it. I was browsing a website called [distrowatch.com](http://distrowatch.com) that has hundreds of Linux distros. All of them are free to use (ubuntu, debian, Kali, Quebes, Tails, etc.) How are they maintained if it doesn’t cost anything to download and install them?
Thank you.
In: Technology
Everybody is saying volunteers, and that’s a big part of it, but it’s actually a bit complex. There are tons of volunteers maintaining many distros, but a lot of work on Linux is also done by companies who use Linux and companies that sell Linux.
Canonical maintains Ubuntu, and Red Hat maintains Fedora. It’s open source software, but there’s still money to be made selling set up and support services to businesses. These companies employ hundreds of people and commit tons of code that everybody integrates.
For most of these distributions, maintenance is deferred with one distro being upstream from another. For example, Ubuntu is upstream from Debian. The Ubuntu team leverages all of the hard work of the Debian team.
This allows anyone including a single person with just moderate spare time to make a well-maintained distro. You can make a few modifications for whatever makes your distro different and useful and publish it as its own distro. This means that the level of effort needed to adequately maintain a distro can vary significantly.
Additionally many distros are simply poorly maintained and are built off of dangerously outdated releases.
There can be significant work maintaining a distro, but it’s just a collection of other parts and tools. It’s quite easy if you just take a distro, tweak things to what you like, and release that as your own personal distro with a funny name.
But Debian, Arch, Ubuntu, openSuse, Red Hat, and Gentoo are all the real deal and take major effort to maintain. Not to mention the actual Linux kernel and the whole ecosystem of tools. And why all the effort? Mostly for free?
Because it’s for us. These are our tools. We want to make our own lives better. It costs us nothing to copy software, and the more eyeballs are on it and the more users it has makes it BETTER. Help any way you can. Bug reports, (good) recommendations, donations. The GNU and Linux are both legitimately good positive things for humanity in a world where that is scarce and rare. Making the world a better place [can be it’s own reward](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc).
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