> I sometimes wonder what the world would look like had more free licenses (such as MIT/BSD) been just a bit more popular during critical points in history, or had less free options like GPLv3 or AGPL come a bit sooner as viable options.

It would have stayed as it was and how we are now back to, thanks to adoption of MIT/BSD and daemonising of GPL.

Public Domain, Sharewhare, Demoware, whateverware.

They too used to occasionally provide source code for the free/demo version.