Mirrors. Lots of small, volunteer-run, low/zero-budget open-source projects cannot afford to pay for the server/CDN bandwidth they would need to host all their

Mirrors. Lots of small, volunteer-run, low/zero-budget open-source projects cannot afford to pay for the server/CDN bandwidth they would need to host all their binary artifacts (ISOs, packages, etc.). They end up relying on mirrors provided for free by third parties instead. By publishing the checksums, they allow you to verify that the ISO image you downloaded from some mirror is the same one that they originally published.