No, the reason Linux is popular is the radical leftists love the communistic "copyleft" aspect of the GPL license, and socialists the world over are rallying behind it. Threats of something being illegal don't curb the desire of those who want something for free in the least, just as we're seeing now.
Software isn't about politics, it's about utility. There was a need for a free UNIX, and Linux was the first to fit that bill. That's it. I know no one who uses Linux because of socialist ideology. They use it because it's a free UNIX.
BSD would have been the first to fit the bill, but the AT&T lawsuit delayed it. Minix could have been it, but Tanenbaum's publisher wouldn't allow it to be free. Linux was first, so Linux is the one that dominated.
Your like let Linux dominate. Enjoy that fact. You let a foreign competitor come to the forefront because you saw free software as a threat and tried to use the legal system to crush it. I wish your like hadn't won, because BSD is better.
Threats of something being illegal don't curb the desire of those who want something for free in the least, just as we're seeing now.
People wanted a free UNIX. BSD wasn't yet considered free. Remember, this is quite a while ago, when Stallman was known mainly in academic circles as the author of some great tools, and had some crazy idea about free software for the general public. This was when pretty much the only thing GPL was what Stallman himself wrote.
BTW, Stallman didn't come up with the term "Copyleft."