I may not make my point clearly - but I have seen from the inside how companies reluctantly use the Linux kernel because it's the industry standard and the boar

I may not make my point clearly - but I have seen from the inside how companies reluctantly use the Linux kernel because it's the industry standard and the board support package comes with Linux. If BSDs had won, there would have been very little incentive to upstream patches or provide source code to customers, but a lot of incentive to pitch the vendors proprietary additions as something special. Every company selling a solution would have been tempted to close off the source and not give anything back. Back then, it was a knee-jerk reaction to keep as much as possible in-house. Everything begins with hardware support. The standard distributions also all used glibc and GNU utilities which is also GPL. For the longest time all standard distributions were based on either RedHat or Debian. I think Linux shaped the industry in very special ways which would not have come naturally in a non-GPL world. Things today are by-and-large extremely open, with github etc being almost a force of nature, but my hunch is that this outcome was not a given which would have just have happened in some kind of manifest-destiny way. I think the world could easily have tipped into a much more proprieraty path without GNU and Linux.