Just for the record, for the most part, it should be legal to sell CD's of most Linux distributions, assuming you honor the GPL and any other licenses for any software that's physically on the disk.
I'm a bit familiar with the sorts of commerce that the parent mentioned.
Back when broadband was uncommon there were shops where you could just order anything that could be found on the Internet and they would burn a CD-R for you. They would keep the most popular files cached locally, and for the really popular stuff they would have pre-burned CDs in small kits with a xeroxed manual and maybe a colored cover and the like. Support was a big thing too, and community: it was a place where people would hang out a bit and talk to other people, share recommendations, meet people who could fix equipment, etc.
So if you ordered a Linux distro they would prepare it for you just like any software, VCD, disk full of MP3s, etc. I know of people who were introduced to Linux via these shops.
There used to be an earlier version of this sort of shop where you could bring floppy disks and they would copy them for you. As far as I know all of this has just about disappeared. Piracy exists but it is nowhere near as popular as it used to be.
What those shops basically sold was bandwidth: it was a physical version of pirate BBSs and w4r3z websites, from a time when phone and Internet access was harder to have.
Back when broadband was uncommon there were shops where you could just order anything that could be found on the Internet and they would burn a CD-R for you. They would keep the most popular files cached locally, and for the really popular stuff they would have pre-burned CDs in small kits with a xeroxed manual and maybe a colored cover and the like. Support was a big thing too, and community: it was a place where people would hang out a bit and talk to other people, share recommendations, meet people who could fix equipment, etc.
So if you ordered a Linux distro they would prepare it for you just like any software, VCD, disk full of MP3s, etc. I know of people who were introduced to Linux via these shops.
There used to be an earlier version of this sort of shop where you could bring floppy disks and they would copy them for you. As far as I know all of this has just about disappeared. Piracy exists but it is nowhere near as popular as it used to be.
What those shops basically sold was bandwidth: it was a physical version of pirate BBSs and w4r3z websites, from a time when phone and Internet access was harder to have.