I just believe in giving credit where credit is do. I have seen MS, time after time, reverse engineer soneone else excellent product/idea and then claim it's an MS invention. Kinda pisses me off. Prior to Unix, computer OS's sucked. Unix/C changed the world of OS's and programming. I kinda think Bell Labs should get the Lion share of the credit.
UNIX was defiantly the inspiration for Linux but I think you do a disservice to both when you call Linux *UNIX* it was not until kernel 2.4 / 2.6 that Linux has become a truly enterprise system. And the development model most assisted by Linux (opensource) has produced many applications which UNIX takes advantage (nmap, cvs, ...) Many old unix apps were released into this model and became more viable dynamic due to the model..