== Release date of the OS? == 

 In this article, the names "Linux" and "GNU/Linux" refer to an operating system, so if a sentence says "Linux was released on DateX", then "DateX" must be the release date of the operating system.  Someone added such a sentence to the intro, and for "DateX" they used "September 17th 1991". 

 This is patent nonsense since the operating system didn't exist on that date.  The kernel-less GNU operating system and the v0.01 of the Linux kernel existed, but that version of the Linux kernel was not functional enough to support an operating system, and even when the Linux kernel became more feature-complete, there was still the work of combining it and GNU to make a complete operating system. 

 As a secondary point, there is probably no day, or even month, that can be claimed as the release date of the operating system because it's transition from not existing to existing was a gradual evolution with no one key date, and also because for it to be released, someone would have to have released it, but I don't think anyone agrees, or even claims, that there is one person or organisation that definitively released the operating system. 

 Clearly, someone has gotten confused by the use of the kernel's name to refer to the operating system.  For clearer thinking, should the article say this: "GNU/Linux was released on September 17th 1991"?  Of course not. 

 That's why I've removed the sentence "Linux was released on Sep 17 1991" from the intro.  At best, the intro could give the year that the operating system became usable.  That was probably 1992, but I'm just guessing.  For the moment I've left it as 1991 in the intro because that's the year that the previous person used.  Can someone give any insight into which year is correct?