The idea was that schools would use the system and that the students would grow accustomed. The result of this would be that when the students graduated, they would demand UNIX implementation when they reached the working world. The same types of strategies have been used to grab market share by such companies as Microsoft and Netscape in recent years. Many times, giving away your software for free is the best way to make money. However, by then the developer community was extended beyond the walls of Bell Labs.
Great programmers steal great software.
Thompson and Joy put out scores of standard UNIX systems and tools over the next decade including the BSD UNIX strains, the C Shell and the vi editor. In the early days, every UNIX system was distributed with a complete set of source code and development tools. Now imagine that nearly all these cars were sold to engineering schools. You might expect that the students would get to work on their cars and that soon no two cars would be the same. Since then, UNIX has grown immensely, incorporating many new modifications, strains, applications and hardware.