You contend that the creation of the GNU utilities -- differently licensed but by and large feature clones of an existing software package was a more important contribution to society than the American automobile safety regulation changes brought about by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed ? Don't forget that BSD was already walking a similar course by that time. Emacs is pretty important, as well, but I think it ranks behind the GNU utilities, as well.

I haven't really tried to contrast them before, honestly, but I don't think it's quite that cut and dry.