Aaaand the tab is closed as my expectations for the story were some hyperbole nonsense.
"An Article about Bill and Lynne Jolitz who wrote an open-source Unix pretty much at the same time Linus Torvalds did but failed to gain any traction" for anyone else who still has an open mind for reading. ;)
Among not too young users of FreeBSD or other BSD derivatives, it is well known that those operating systems have been partially based on 386BSD, which was written by the Jolitzes. Their role for BSDs is indeed as important as the role of Linus for Linux.
While even inside the BSD community they are not as well known as Linus is elsewhere, that is normal, because their contributions ended after the first years, while Linus remained very active until now.
I have started to use both FreeBSD and Linux in 1995, and until around 2003/2004 FreeBSD was much better.
Then the BSD derivatives had very slow transitions to being able to handle multi-threaded and multi-core processors and also to handle more modern peripherals, e.g. GPUs, while Linux improved much faster than them.
And I am certain that there are "more famous" (whatever that might mean) programmers individuals do not know because of different interests and disciplines.