I find it fascinating that RMS made his pronouncement in '83 and Linus in '91 (8 years later). At the time (and I was at Sun at that time) 'GNU' was still pretty much just a concept, all of the effort from 1983 -> 1991 was in C (gcc), binutils, and emacs. USL was on the verge of suing BSDi for their BSD project (AT&T had been lobbing threats at the GNU effort for years, especially their use of the word 'UNIX' in the description of their acronym)
Post lawsuit RMS wrote his manifesto and the GPL was born, and the various BSD flavors of UNIX were the only UNIX kernels that had had their software provenance litigated.
Into that Linus wrote his entirely new kernel which was 'unix like' but not UNIX at all on the inside (generally user land felt like UNIX because MINIX felt like UNIX).
And because Linux had a pretty complete history from birth to present (making tracing software ownership possible) RMS annexed it as the GNU "kernel" trying to get everyone to call it GNU/Linux for a while.
I think you're discounting the state of GNU in 1991 by quite a bit. It's probably true that the bulk of the "effort" was spend on the toolchain (because, well, toolchain), but almost all of the GNU userspace (bash, coreutils, make, flex/bison, etc...) was present and working at that time. It was routine on the proprietary Unix boxes I was working with for someone to have built all the GNU stuff and left it in /usr/gnu/bin for use. Frankly the userspace stuff was already better in many ways (c.f. all the feature/bloat flames, "cat has arguments", etc...) than the proprietary equivalents already.
When Linux arrived, it was booting to a working free userspace within months. The FSF had, from their perspective, the right plan. They certainly weren't just a compiler.
I was also at Sun in '91. Michael Tiemann worked there for a while, on gcc.
Prior to my time at Sun, I'd made contributions to gcc, gdb, gas and emacs (all in support of the Convex architecture) before my time at Sun. (My former boss from Convex was the president of BSDi, too. Most of the engineers from Prisma, his company between Convex and BSDi, came to Sun when Prisma folded, becoming the early version of Sun's RMTC.)
You do some disservice to rms here. Easy enough to understand (rms is easy to dislike).
By 91, GNU had a compiler, and emacs, both of which Linus used to develop his kernel.
Not that this is particularly relevant to anything, but AFAIK even back then Linus was using MicroEMACS, not gnu emacs.
Having said that, I agree that people are generally discounting rms' immense contributions* a bit too easily here.
* (both technical contributions and in terms of just the entire culture of open source, which he really helped shape in a very significant way, and I say that as someone who mostly dislikes the GPL and prefers MIT/BSD style licenses)
I was a student at the time, but it seemed like GCC was like the Linux of its day, causing a lot of upheavals in the compiler market. GCC code was so fast compared to what was out there.
My impression, as someone who had a used Sun 3/50 in the early 90s, who later used Linux a lot, and who used various Unix workstations (IBM, Sun, Next, SGI, HP) in college:
For the bulk of Unix user/developers, the big thing was that GCC reintroduced the idea that you should be able to get free dev tools for your Unix OS, during a time when some vendors had decided that you should pay more to get the dev tools in addition to the base OS.
I agree, though it's notable that open source is quite distinct from free software. I recall the beginning of the open source movement well. I would argue that the GPL is Stallman's greatest contribution to programming.
RMS annexed it as the GNU "kernel" trying to get everyone to call it GNU/Linux for a while.
As dllthomas said, RMS never wanted the kernel to be called "GNU/Linux", he wanted (wants) the Linux kernel with the GNU userland to be called "GNU/Linux".
I see that you an link to the Wikipedia page on the naming controversy. "Operating system", at least as RMS uses it, doesn't refer to the kernel, it refers to the kernel+userland.
And to dllthomas' point, the controversy is the 'it'. Naming things is a pain, and naming computer things is a bigger pain. That was the root of the controversy.
Today most people who use a Linux distribution on their machine will say they run Linux or "distroname" (like Ubuntu or CentOS) on their machine. They don't say they run Gnome 2/Linux Kernel 3.x/gcc 4/gnu utils 2.8. By RMS' reasoning (and he is very precise in this) the "Operating System" is not "Linux" it is "GNU/Linux". They even added a field for it in uname(1) (-o).
The "Operating System" is a combination of the kernel, the editors, and user tools, and the compilers. Go back and read his original announcement, this is his definition:
"To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker, assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a text formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that normally comes with a Unix system, and anything else useful, including on-line and hardcopy documentation."
By that original definition, we shouldn't even bother calling it GNU/Linux should we? Its just GNU. I expect taking that position though would be quite unpopular.
As the Wikipedia page alludes to, there were at least two camps at the time. Many, like myself who 'grew up' on the UNIX side of the house, the Naming Hierarchy was 'kernel->[userland]->window system' So it was SunOS->SunTools or SunOS->X/News. If you called something a "UNIX" system it meant that the kernel was based on the design architecture of Thompon, Ritchey, et al from Bell Labs. SunOS, IRIX, SystemV, and Unicos were all "UNIX" systems even though their userland code and window systems (if they had one) varied. Even in RMS' original statement of purpose, the first component of GNU was a kernel, and some other bits.
So to someone with the same background as I've had you could call it Linux/GNU (hierarchy preserved) or "Ubuntu" based on Linux with GNU tools. But Linux as the kernel architecture is at the top of the naming chain, not GNU.
For folks who came up from the DOS/PC side of things the 'window system' was the primary naming tool (in this case Windows). It was PC-DOS/Windows for a while but Microsoft decided to go all out and make "Windows" the brand/trademark they hung their hat on, and we got Windows/DOS, Windows/NT, Windows 98, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Etc.
As dllthomas illustrates, the interpretation of the 'it' part rooted the disagreement, and which side of the disagreement one resonated with seemed strongly correlated with ones early exposure to naming conventions.
My belief is that the emotion in the discussion came from egos, or people feeling person A or person B's contributions or impact were over or under valued. We can see some of that in the comments here where people emotionally jump to a conclusion that I'm down on RMS (I'm not), or even partisan in this debate (I'm not that either). There is ample documentation that Linus' goal with Linux was to write a new OS from scratch kind of like (but better than :-) MINIX. And there is ample documentation that RMS' goal was to create an operating environment that was unencumbered by onerous restrictions. It was fortuitous the Linus' work was so successful, and it was fortuitous that Linus could leverage the work done in the preceding 9 years in making tools available for him to use.
But it was also clear that Linus wasn't specifically supporting the GNU project by writing Linux (although he subscribed to the philosophy). When RMS started claiming as part of the project it set up this little tempest. Perhaps the term 'annex' is too emotionally charged to be used for that action.
FWIW, I frequently refer to the system I run as "Linux" - with the fact that there's a sizable amount of GNU code pretty much assumed by the fact that I'm running a Linux kernel and it's a server or desktop and not an embedded device or something. I just think the case for "GNU/Linux" is better than it is frequently made out to be, and (as mentioned) disagreed about Stallman's position on the issue.
"RMS annexed it as the GNU "kernel" trying to get everyone to call it GNU/Linux for a while."
This is not how I remember it. RMS has not, to my knowledge, ever pushed for the Linux kernel to be called GNU/Linux, but for systems running a combination of GNU software and the Linux kernel to be called GNU/Linux.
When Linus Torvalds was asked in the documentary Revolution OS whether the name "GNU/Linux" was justified, he replied:
Well, I think it's justified, but it's justified if
you actually make a GNU distribution of Linux ... the
same way that I think that "Red Hat Linux" is fine, or
"SuSE Linux" or "Debian Linux", because if you actually
make your own distribution of Linux, you get to name the
thing, but calling Linux in general "GNU Linux" I think
is just ridiculous.[34]
It came up in the documentary because there had been a huge firestorm over RMS saying everyone should call it GNU/Linux. Various allegations of 'usurpery' etc and generally bad feelings. Linus' counter, which he made in the documentary and I had heard in person at a Usenix conference was that if the GNU project made a distro (and this is still a valid point) where everything in it was free and wanted to call it "GNU/Linux" that would be great, but trying to change the kernel name from Linux to GNU/Linux is just silly (or ridiculous as Linus points out).
[34] ^ Moore, J.T.S. (Produced, Written, and Directed) (2001). Revolution OS (DVD).
That's somewhat oblique, easily attributed to misunderstanding (I'm not sure what actual question was asked - it's been a decade since I saw Revolution OS), and poorly thought out: a "Red Hat Linux" system at the time was running more GNU code than Linux code (and overwhelmingly more than Red Hat code).
Every damned other thing in there seems to argue precisely the opposite.
I defy you to find anything Stallman said (as opposed to characterizations by others, which could easily be deliberate or accidental mischaracterizations) that implies a position that a system without GNU code (or with insignificant amounts) running Linux should be called GNU/Linux. If such exists, then I will agree with you that Stallman once held the absurd position you attribute to him.
Edited to add:
"It came up in the documentary because there had been a huge firestorm over RMS saying everyone should call it GNU/Linux."
I agree that there was a huge firestorm over RMS saying everyone should call it GNU/Linux. I disagree with what that "it" refers to.
A Red Hat system was running more code for GNOME/KDE than either coreutils or Linux. Should we call it GNOME/GNU/Linux? Probably, because GNOME was designed from the beginning to be a usable desktop for users. There is a GNU, and it is running on their system, but it is just part of the system they use.
Also, LOC is a really poor metric for comparing the importance of a piece of software for a system. Many applications have far more LOC than the entire OS itself, and you wouldn't call that app more essential than the OS.
Post lawsuit RMS wrote his manifesto and the GPL was born, and the various BSD flavors of UNIX were the only UNIX kernels that had had their software provenance litigated.
Into that Linus wrote his entirely new kernel which was 'unix like' but not UNIX at all on the inside (generally user land felt like UNIX because MINIX felt like UNIX).
And because Linux had a pretty complete history from birth to present (making tracing software ownership possible) RMS annexed it as the GNU "kernel" trying to get everyone to call it GNU/Linux for a while.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi