Yes and no; due to antitrust laws with AT&T, almost everyone had copies of UNIX source code, especially if you were near any universities (why does BSD still ho

Yes and no; due to antitrust laws with AT&T, almost everyone had copies of UNIX source code, especially if you were near any universities (why does BSD still honor UC Berkeley on bootup, do you think?). Easy as pie to get; but extremely difficult to legally use without a license. The question about whether Linux and GNU copied from the proprietary originals caused the famous SCO lawsuits. Even though this was proven false, there’s very little chance the originals weren’t used as reference in GNU.