One thing that you are certainly correct about is that the situation is quite different in the enterprise market, from the home user 'market'. If you just mix up the two cases, you won't get anything meaningful. Enterprise users are mostly prepared to pay for support (assuming that they can rely on that support when they really need it, and the prices are reasonable), home users less so. If you remember, RedHat and openSUSE (although, this was back when they did the capitalisation differently, and I don't even remember which variation they used, back then, given that it seems to change every couple of years) used to be available as boxed sets, in which you got disks and books and some support, for money. RH decided it wasn't really interested in the desktop use case, whether enterprise or not, and then it was logical to only concentrate on servers and support. Suse was still interested in the enterprise desktop use case, so its slightly less clear why they de-emphasised the box sets (you can still apparently buy them, but I haven't seen one in ages).

@snowpine
So, maybe that's a better question; is there something about being a paid for distro that somehow encourages suckitude, where suckitude wouldn't otherwise exist? An alternative hypothesis is that, if your ambition is to be a rip-off merchant and think that producing a (minimal effort) distro and selling same for cash is your path to riches and fortune, then everyone is going to be disappointed with the outcome.

@dugan
Hmmm, I'm unsure of this one; yes, the Suse printed docs are excellent, but you can download everything as .pdfs, so you wouldn't necessarily assign a big value to the book. OTOH, if you just want a 'one stop shop' with the disks, the docs and a period of support, to get you over the initial learning curve, I think that you can argue that you really can't do better. Trouble is, that probably isn't what experienced linux users are looking for, and it isn't well enough known amongst the people who would really benefit (who have a tendency to think that Linux = RedHat, or Linux = Ubuntu, depending on where they are coming from).

eLive is not a bad desktop distro (I wouldn't put it in my Top 10, maybe in the Top 50%?) and last I checked they were charging about $15 for it, for the software not the support.

I think this is a little misleading. It is perfectly legal for them to charge for compiled versions of a Linux based OS and they can and do do that. However, they must provide the source code at reasonable cost in order to comply with the GPL. From this source code (in the case of Red Hat) people then put together CentOS and Scientific Linux.
Apologies for nitpicking but I think it's worth clarifying that it's perfectly legal to sell Linux based OSs and GNU software as long as the source is available. Also in some cases I think that even when the letter of the license is followed the source provided cannot necessarily be made into an OS without a lot of work (I've a feeling Android is heading in this direction).

2 members found this post helpful.

It depends on the included software, however. While this is true of software released under virtually any free software license (or at least those recognized as such by the FSF), any non-free software may have licensing terms which restrict resale.

273 and YellowApple, lets be perfectly clear in what i stated. it is illegal to charge money for the code.

https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/COPYING

you can charge for the service. there is a distinct difference between the CODE and the SERVICE. it is illegal to charge for code. it is not however illegal to charge for the service to access that code or any other added value service like customer support, etc... as i mentioned above.

great replies to everybody

BTW, I forgot to mentioned some of these distros were sold in compusa in my area back in the late 90s and early 2000s. This was in the heydays of modems usage. I remember these distros vividly from that store.

Redhat
Debian (10 dics box set)
SUSE
Turbolinux
Mandrake
Xandros

FreeBSD and NetBSD

There may have been others but this what I remember back then.

They cannot charge an unreasonable fee for the source code but they can, and do, charge anything they like for the compiled OS. There is a difference and it was that I was attempting to clarify.

From day-one, Red Hat set out to move Linux into the world of corporate computing, and the way that they did this was by providing paid-for support ... as well as implementation assistance in getting Linux to operate reliably on different kinds of hardware that corporations were already using.

They took their company public, but didn't simply dump all the shares that they could have sold and waltz-away with the profits. They invested the windfall of money that resulted, putting it back into the business and into cash reserves. ("Money talks.") From the very beginning, they had a revenue-model, and they could tell you exactly what it was and why it would work. It did.

Their strategy always has been to identify what corporate customers need for their operating-system suppliers to be able to promise, and then to fulfill that promise consistently ... in exchange for a fairly-hefty price tag which these customers are quite willing to pay. The "money shot" is that your systems won't become unreliable, they won't incur unpredictable maintenance-and-upkeep costs, and you can maintain thousands of them efficiently. "This is an expense that you can predict, amortize, and budget for." It actually is a very excellent proposition, and Red Hat has shown that they can deliver. Their present financial and business position is quite honestly earned.