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Thirty years ago, on this day, a Finnish student announced his plans to the world: he wanted to develop an operating system, and he'd already ported some components of the GNU operating system to work with his kernel.
https://web.archive.org/web/1/http://lwn.net/2001/0823/a/lt-announcement.php3

He went on to release that which he referred to as a kernel under the name Linux, initially as proprietary software.
https://web.archive.org/web/1/https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.01
https://web.archive.org/web/1/http://www.oldlinux.org/Linus/index.html

If you were to believe the fake software freedom supporters who (**) celebrate Linux today, you'd be celebrating a proprietary software pre-release announcement.

They pretend the GNU operating system, that he credited and relied on, and that spared him from duplicating the effort of development of most of the operating system, does not exist, or is not relevant.

By relying on GNU software and freedoms, he could focus on developing the kernel, and he eventually turned it into a major contribution to humankind when he re-released it as FLOSS, and the combination of Linux and GNU went on to achieve significant interest, adoption, and user freedom. Historical records suggest the relicensing of Linux took effect on Feb 1st, 1992.
https://web.archive.org/web/1/http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.12

Software freedom supporters have celebrated GNU on Sept 27. How about also celebrating the first (*) Linux liberation, the first major Free Software gift Linus Torvalds has given us all, on Feb 1st?

Thank you, Linus Torvalds!

So blong,

(*) That's not to be confused with the second liberation of Linux, in response to the integration of proprietary blobs in the kernel Linux, some of them present to this date. The second liberation efforts eventually became the GNU Linux-libre project.

(**) (added on 2021-08-27) Richard Stallman tells me there is a risk that this sentence may be read as implying that everyone who celebrates Linux on that day is a fake software freedom supporter. I honestly don't see how; even though I wrote 'who' rather than 'that', I'm not separating the relative clause with a comma, so it's to be read as restrictive. Anyway, for avoidance of any doubt, it was meant to be read as the intersection of two sets: the set of fake software freedom supporters, and the set of parties who celebrate Linux on Aug 25, without any implication that the sets are equivalent, or that one is a subset of the other. I hope nobody read it in an unintended way.