Linus only made the kernel. In fact , he initially wasnt even going to release it under the GPL. Linux would be nothing without the GNU. It was only ever designed to be a hobby.

Stallmans GNU had most of the userland made already. They were working on thier own kernel (Hurd) but it was going on way too slow

Thats why its officially called GNU/Linux.

Whichever one you choose, you will still need to cover some of the other one.

I did a similar thing at college and did it on Tim Berners Lee

It's better to do your report on something you enjoy, but personally, I find RMS to be a better topic in that there's more potential interesting content.

>Thats why its officially called GNU/Linux.
Officially by whom? Linux has never agreed that GNU/Linux is a valid name, nor has LI. There's controversy everywhere about it, usually stemming from the fact that RMS didn't start whining about the name until it was obvious that Linux was becoming popular. Generally you won't see GNU/Linux except from GNU propaganda[1] and RMS minions. The Linux side seems to prefer the much more practical method of referring to a distribution (SuSE, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Mandriva, etc...). Normal people do the same thing with Linux that they do with Unix by referring to all variations as "Linux", but changing it to GNU/Linux doesn't accomplish anything meaningful in that case.

[1] Note that there are several very long pages on the GNU website that explain why Linux should be called GNU/Linux, which cleanly falls under the category of "He doth protest too much".