It sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? Microsoft, Apple, and other companies charge for their software, so it sounds a bit odd that you'd be able to download software that's equivalent to Windows or Mac OS X free of charge. What's up with that?
The short answer is that some people think that software should be distributed under free and open source licenses that allow the software to be freely shared -- and even modified! This has been going on a very long time; the GNU Project was formed in 1984 by Richard Stallman, before Microsoft shipped the first version of Windows, and the same year Apple shipped the first version of its "classic" Mac OS.
It took a while to gather steam, and it wasn't until 1991 that Linus Torvalds (Figure:creator of linux) put out the first public release of Linux. Torvalds had also ported the Bash shell and GCC to Linux, to make it worth using. Eventually, Torvalds settled on the GNU General Public License (GPL) as the kernel's license.
The GPL, which was developed by the GNU Project, allows you to share software under the GPL with anyone you want. You can even modify the software you get under the GPL, and distribute the new version, as long as you share your changes under the same terms (the GPL) that you received the software under.
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