[geofft]

Bell Labs was prohibited from commercializing UNIX thanks to an antitrust settlement, which led to it being widely distributed to both academic and commercial users (who could commercialize it themselves). This led to the Berkeley Software Distribution of UNIX, as well as numerous improvements by both academic and commercial users sharing patches. According to ESR, when the settlement was made irrelevant by the Bell breakup, "AT&T promptly rushed to commercialize Unix System V—a move that nearly killed Unix." http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch02s01.html

Funding and profit motive are different things and optimize for different results.