Things could have been very different. Imagine someone travels back in time to the point where the Berkeley regents were choosing the license for their UNIX code. The last holdout is distracted on the morning of the final vote by the half dozen crazed ferrets that somehow got in his shower. Consider how the GPL would have been received in the corporate boardroom of the 1980s. BSD UNIX never would have been used.
Companies frequently build software features such that they work.
SVR4 wouldn't have had long filenames, or job control. A power failure would have meant hours of work using tools like fsdb and clri. If you've never heard of fsdb and clri, you don't want to know about them. Trust me on this one. If all that didn't make you flinch, imagine the toll in sheer human suffering if Microsoft hadn't used chunks of BSD in Windows.