Linus Torvalds or RMS?

[OutOfReach]

HOLD ON! Before you hit the 'Reply' button. This is not what it seems. This isn't another Linus vs RMS battle.
In school we are doing this living museum project/research were we must pick an influencial person in history and then present to a group of people. I narrowed it down to two people: Linus Torvalds and Richard M. Stallman.
I think you'll agree with me when I say they both have done several influencial things. But which shall I pick? Richard founded the GNU project, the Free Software Foundation, and the GNU General Public License. And has developed apps like gcc, emacs and gdb.
On the other hand, Linus Torvalds created one of the most advanced operating systems today, which no doubt changed the computing world as we know it.

Which would you think would be the best to give an oral report on?

I am sort of leaning onto Linus's side just because I love Linux. Should I just trust my gut and go for Linus?

[jbennet]

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

[Narue]

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".