Comment by ndiddy

The first time any BSD code was made publicly available was Networking Release 1 (just contained the networking stack) in 1989, or around 5 years after Stallman started the GNU project. It took until Networking Release 2 in 1991 for the code for a runnable BSD operating system to be made publicly available. Prior to that, BSD was based on proprietary UNIX source code, and anyone who wanted to run it had to purchase a source code license from AT&T.