I consider GCC to be the GNU flagship. There are are certainly other candidates ( Emacs has fans ) but GIMP is not an unreasonable proposal.
I don’t know if I would say “they” instigated GNOME depending on who “they” are. The free software movement certainly inspired GNOME ( hence the name ) but GNOME was started by Miguel de Icaza while he was still a University student. I don’t think RMS or anybody else at the FSF ( or GNU ) really had anything to do with it beyond inspiration. Miguel wanted an Open Source desktop to counter KDE which required Qt ( proprietary at the time ). He chose GTK instead. Despite that, Miguel and RMS were never completely on the same page in my view. As you say, GNOME is explicitly not a GNU project now. The FSF never really managed the GNOME project. Not long into its history, GNOME started its own foundation ( back in 2000 ).
Miguel has started multiple “for profit” software businesses including one expecting to make GNOME software ( Ximian ). Miguel founded the Mono project to make an Open Source .NET implementation originally to make GNOME software. Richard Stallman wrote essays telling people not to use Mono and the FSF even started a competing initiative ( DotGNU - went nowhere ). Miguel allowed the Mono Project to become corporately backed ( Novell ) and started his own .NET company ( Xamarin ) after Novell let the Mono team go. Xamarin was a for profit software business which was eventually sold to Microsoft. Mono is now a core part of .NET from Microsoft and Xamarin forms the basis for MAUI, Microsoft’s cross-platform app framework. Miguel works at Microsoft now. All this Microsoft stuff is also Open Source ( .NET, MAUI, Mono ).
I would argue that Richard Stallman and the FSF played just as big a role in the chain of events that led .NET to being Open Source as they did in “instigating” GNOME. That is, they are hugely important historical trail-blazers but not direct participants.
Here is the list of GNU projects to choose from:
https://www.gnu.org/software/software.html#allgnupkgs
I consider GCC to be the GNU flagship. There are are certainly other candidates ( Emacs has fans ) but GIMP is not an unreasonable proposal.
I don’t know if I would say “they” instigated GNOME depending on who “they” are. The free software movement certainly inspired GNOME ( hence the name ) but GNOME was started by Miguel de Icaza while he was still a University student. I don’t think RMS or anybody else at the FSF ( or GNU ) really had anything to do with it beyond inspiration. Miguel wanted an Open Source desktop to counter KDE which required Qt ( proprietary at the time ). He chose GTK instead. Despite that, Miguel and RMS were never completely on the same page in my view. As you say, GNOME is explicitly not a GNU project now. The FSF never really managed the GNOME project. Not long into its history, GNOME started its own foundation ( back in 2000 ).
Miguel has started multiple “for profit” software businesses including one expecting to make GNOME software ( Ximian ). Miguel founded the Mono project to make an Open Source .NET implementation originally to make GNOME software. Richard Stallman wrote essays telling people not to use Mono and the FSF even started a competing initiative ( DotGNU - went nowhere ). Miguel allowed the Mono Project to become corporately backed ( Novell ) and started his own .NET company ( Xamarin ) after Novell let the Mono team go. Xamarin was a for profit software business which was eventually sold to Microsoft. Mono is now a core part of .NET from Microsoft and Xamarin forms the basis for MAUI, Microsoft’s cross-platform app framework. Miguel works at Microsoft now. All this Microsoft stuff is also Open Source ( .NET, MAUI, Mono ).
I would argue that Richard Stallman and the FSF played just as big a role in the chain of events that led .NET to being Open Source as they did in “instigating” GNOME. That is, they are hugely important historical trail-blazers but not direct participants.