In its early days, the FSF used to send out tapes with “GNU” and charged (considerable, if fair) fees for media and labour, because FTP access was difficult to

In its early days, the FSF used to send out tapes with “GNU” and charged (considerable, if fair) fees for media and labour, because FTP access was difficult to come by outside academic circles. The webpage can’t be that old (the web itself being younger), but still dates from the times when it might have made sense to buy a consumer Linux distro in a store, as a bunch of CDs in a box (I still have mine somewhere). In the world of pervasive broadband and cheap hosting, I don’t think this business model could work—everybody you release your stuff to will just upload it to a public site. Red Hat will terminate the support contract in that case, which to me feels like a legal exploit I’m kind of conflicted about.