Linux.com

There are two major reasons why Linux is free (as in speech). 1. Is Linus Torvalds who designed and built (and still codes and manages) the Linux kernel. He wanted a free Unix system to work/play with. 2. Is Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) which he founded. He has been the most vocal and influential proponent of free software. Richard, who was the original author of the Emacs text editing system and the FSF formed GNU.org to develop and distribute free software such as emacs, the GNU compiler series (gcc, gdb, et al), and many other tools and sub-systems that go into what we know as Linux. So, the reason Linux is free is that the developers of the Linux kernel and all the related systems wanted it to be so. There are so many version of Linux because with all this free software, people are easily able to modify it for their own purposes. Some have tailored Linux for image processing, audio composing and mixing, video authoring and editing, scientific and engineering tasks, embedded and real-time systems, and high-security systems for the NSA. Because of the GNU licenses, all these versions have to provide the source code as well. What a plethora of goodies! Enjoy!

Sometimes real fast is almost as good as real time. Remember, Google is your friend!