Things worked for me like this while growing as a kid in Burgas, Bulgaria, up until I graduated in 1994.

There was a guy that used to carry a big back of disks - Apple ][, but mostly PC, where he would let people copy off things he got, but often he charged - for example I had to pay something like $1 for Mission Impossible back then (the Apple ][ and the PC game - can't remember which one I've got).

Open source wasn't really in my mind then, and It was a really good awesome moment when I saw that there are sources for a compression program (zip/unzip). Until then we've had PKWARE Arc, PKWARE Zip, LHA, LZH - and everything that was coming was only DOS binaries (no source).

And then one day he got this disk with these sources, and for some reason he let me borrow the disk and copy it.