What UNIX are you thinking of? Even the Berkeley distribution appeared to require a license from AT&T to use, for V7 UNIX. Anything with AT&T's code was litigiously protected, culminating in a law suit in the 90s against 4.4BSD Lite, which was the first to claim to be rid of all AT&T code. Are you saying most installations were just unlicensed copies?
We need to nuke the Apple bullshit from MacOS Catalina and convert it into people’s operating system. Ethics be damned.