this feels like a silly thing to say but even though i’ve been using linux since 2004 I feel like i’m learning recently that the impact of the GNU project’s software (and its design decisions) on me is even bigger than I thought
like even just the fact that (afaik) many of them used Emacs has an impact on me today
(please no “it’s GNU/Linux”)
Julia Evans
Nelson Minargcc and glibc. Or if there were, it'd be very very different. I think the community has outgrown the FSF now but I have great respect for what they started.@b0rk @nelson The GNU project was also an early champion of portability. They *wanted* their software to work everywhere to show that their stuff was *good*. So they built it that way. That had an outsized impact on how people thought about software portability.
(Fun fact, glibc is the only C standard library implementation that worked on multiple operating systems. Nobody else ever did that before and I haven't seen such a thing since.)
@Conan_Kudo It was more of necessity, no free operating system existed back in the early 90s.
The GNU C library has only worked with the GNU system and variants (GNU/Linux, and GNU/kFreeBSD). I'm not aware of any other system where glibc was supported.
Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) 
Alfred M. Szmidt