I think there's even a theory that one of the reasons BSD is a small niche OS and Linux powers the world is because BSD was tied up in litigation for a while.
I don't know if it's a theory as so much as it actually happened. I remember the SCO lawsuits and it scared a lot of people away from BSD, the user base was a decent portion on free *nix at the time and it was virtually overnight Linux became the uncontested dominate force when that happened. SCO had a huge chilling effect on BSD which was it's intention all along.
