I used to believe that absent the lawsuits that BSD would have been THE choice instead of Linux, but I think there's a lot of truth to the position that Linux was far more experimental and evolving rapidly -- and exciting! -- than FreeBSD (et all) which were busy doing things like powering the biggest web companies of the 90s (Yahoo and many more). Making waves and iterating rapidly was never going to mesh with the Unix Way (even open source Unix). As such, Linux got the mind-share of hackers, idealists, students, and startups and the rest is history.

(I think it's a pity that the useful innovations that happened in Linux cannot be moved back over to FreeBSD because of licensing -- the computing world would be better off if it could.)