Bruce Perens one of the founders of the "Open Source Initiative" and leading developer of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution states that most of what he does comes from Richard Stallman and the GNU Project. Richard Stallman is the founder of the Free Software Foundation which created the GNU operating system. The GNU system is used together with the Linux "kernel" to have an operating system called GNU/Linux.
To learn more about GNU visit:
The GNU Project
http://www.gnu.org
The Free Software Foundation
http://www.fsf.org