Those came out to scratch an itch. If AT&T had maintained a monopoly on UNIX API, someone else would have scratched the itch. Maybe someone would have designed

Those came out to scratch an itch. If AT&T had maintained a monopoly on UNIX API, someone else would have scratched the itch. Maybe someone would have designed an interface and explicitly granted public reproduction rights, as many products have done before UNIX and after. So even with this change, we'd still likely have most of not all of the same overall solutions, derived from other places.