Outside of Bell Labs the thing was "order the V32 tape. Never install it. Send copies of the license to Berkeley. Run 4BSD."
Right - certainly my behavior and what I preached at the time. But it was also true for >>some<< sites inside the labs - frankly many from the ones I knew (Mary Ann what did run in Columbus). There were definitely copies of BSD in IH, as I know sent some of the stuff from my own work there. I never really understood who 'had' to run 32/V or (PWB 3.0 and PWB 4.0) and like Redman and the Marx machines were 'allowed' to be BSD.
What I came to realize is that if a site ran VMS inside the labs, it was because they either had a commercial app that required it, or a had some really important FORTRAN code that needed the DEC tools. In the case of the later, since the stuff I worked on had a commercial Fortran compiler associated (great-great-grandfather to PGI compilers), those sites could use BSD so they could get the distribution (I must have written about 25-30 tapes before I left). But my stuff only ran on BSD 4.1/4.1a/4.1b/4.1c - I think Rick Spieklemeyers updated it when 4.2 and 4.3 finally finished but I had left UCB by then.