“The free software movement’s biggest failure is an ironic one: our free software became so appealing to geeks that usage and development of free programs spread much more than the appreciation of the freedom that the movement is based on. As a result, our views came to be seen as eccentric in the community that we built.”
– Richard Stallman
He initiated the Free Software Foundation(FSF) in 1984 to develop a free operating system. By 1992 all the parts of operating system was ready except kernel. Actually the kernel, Gnu Hurd, development started at in 1986. It was complex micro kernel based architecture. Its complexity and other multiple decision making slowed its development. But a student project, linux, was released under Gnu General Public License (GPL) by 1991. Since it is released under GPL, which protect the philosophy of Gnu, FSF can use it to build complete OS, without waiting for the completion of Gnu Hurd kernel. With the last missing part available FSF and other companies started using free operating system. This lead companies to call the Gnu project in the name of linux, because they dodnt like the philosophy of FSF. Actually linux is a single program. There are 1000s of other programs in an operating system those all work together to form Operating System.
So please give some credit to Gnu project also by calling the OS Gnu/Linux.