One interesting thing about GNU is that originally developers were encouraged to implement work a-like solutions, but with completely different internals. This

One interesting thing about GNU is that originally developers were encouraged to implement work a-like solutions, but with completely different internals. This resulted in a large number of improvements over the standard Unix tools (a great example being bison vs yacc). I'll probably get some push back from the BSD folks, but back in the old days it was pretty common to install GNU (without the kernel) on every new Unix box you got because the GNU utilities were considered to be better (possibly some of them have gotten a bit bloated... bash... ;-) ).