During the last two decades, many kinds of periodic sequences with good pseudo-random properties have been constructed from classical and generalized cyclotomic classes, and used as keystreams for stream ciphers and secure communications. Among them are a family DH-GCS d of generalized cyclotomic sequences on the basis of Ding and Helleseth's generalized cyclotomy, of length pq and order d = gcd(p − 1, q − 1) for distinct odd primes p and q. The linear complexity (or linear span), as a valuable measure of unpredictability, is precisely determined for DH-GCS 8 in this paper. Our approach is based on Edemskiy and Antonova's computation method with the help of explicit expressions of Gaussian classical cyclotomic numbers of order 8. Our result for d = 8 is compatible with Yan's low bound (pq − 1)/2 of the linear complexity for any order d, which means high enough to resist security attacks of the Berlekamp-Massey algorithm. Finally, we include SageMath codes to illustrate the validity of our result by examples.