I think that, once you're going that far back in history, it's pretty critical to keep track of the GNU/Linux distinction. Linus just wrote a kernel. And then the GNU userland, which had already been in development since the mid 80s, but was still somewhat lacking a workable kernel, was adopted as the official userland to use with the Linux kernel.

And at roughly the same time, IIRC, when Sun decided to migrate their Unix from a BSD flavor to a SysV flavor, which came to be called Solaris, they also used some GNU bits. Which might explain some similarities between the two.