Citation :
That is just what he wants you to think.
When Linux was created there were a lot of gaps in the stack. The kernel was Linux, the compiler and linker were GNU and some of the Unix shell utilities, but a lot had to be written from scratch or ported from BSD and X11.
The entire suite of networking software came from BSD and it all was required back then since the community was very small (telnet, ftp, lpr/lpd, rlogin/rcp) a lot had to be written from scratch (minicom, init, login, file system tools, uucp) the typesetting system came from Stanford (tex) the GUI from Berkley (Tcl/Tk; He mounted an anti-Tcl campaign at some point as well).
They were not under the GNU banner, they were created for the emergent OS and the emergent OS got software from anywhere it could. Including MIT, BSD, CMU, the software tools group, Usenix and any other source of software we could get our hands on.
Yes, GNU played a role, and so did some 400+ sources of packages within the first couple of years of Linux.
Here is what Linux looked like in the early days, the SLS distribution:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/histori [...] /sls/1.03/
1/3rd of it alone is X11; TeX alone used 3 floppy disks, which is equivalent to the GNU contribution on those early distributions.
TeX/Linux FTW!
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