Well it might be nice to not have the "church of Stallman" cultists ranting and raving "rah rah, fight the man" to deal with, or the "wah wah, it's trademarked so it's teh evilz" whackjobs .... it would be a wildly different landscape to deal with.
I mean no open source, no GCC... If Linus had gone ahead and built an OS, would it still have been a Unix-like? What compiler would he have ended up using? No Xfree86 as a X11R6 implementation, what would people have put atop it for a GUI if any? As a Unix-like without open source would it even have taken off since let's face it, without Linux the entire Unix "concept" would have continued its slide into obsolescence.
Which depending on your opinion of Unix and Posixisms in general might not have been a bad thing. Let's be honest, until Linux as a whole Unix was dying... a slow, agonizing, and frankly well deserved death. The ONLY people who gave a flying purple fish about Unix were back-room server geeks struggling to keep big iron relevant in the microcomputer age, and career educators long in the tooth and short on relevance.