The Linux kernel is licensed under GPLv2, and copyright by a cast of thousands, beginning with Linus Torvalds. That part is not at any risk from Stallman's antics. His new license simply doesn't apply to the Linux kernel, and there is nothing he can do about it. Linus and all the top kernel maintainers have stated clearly and with certainty that they are not moving off the GPLv2 license.
But a great swath of user code, including the critical gcc compiler, and most of the classic Unix utilities, is under Free Software Foundation, Inc. (FSF) copyright. The FSF can re-release that code under any license it chooses, and can decide to accept any future changes only under some other license, such as GPLv3 instead of GPLv2.
There are currently over 5,000 such GNU software packages, as listed at FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory. These packages are critical to all BSD and Linux based systems, including Mac OS X.
FSF owns this code. Programmers cannot currently get any changes into the main line of code development for this software unless they hand over Copyright to FSF.
What programmers can do is to fork all this code, before -any- GPLv3 only changes are made to it, and continue to use, modify, and distribute it, under the GPLv2 license terms granted everyone. The major distributions, such as Red Hat, SuSE, Debian and Ubuntu, could seal the success of such a fork, by refusing to pick up GPLv3 code.
If that happened, the FSF would cease to be an active player. They would continue to hold copyright on this code in perpetuity. But almost no one would send them any more changes, and they would be out of the loop, both in terms of license affect, and in terms of code maintenance.
Thats the Rub, Linus, Red Hat, Novell, and IBM have far more power than Stalman does and this is perhaps the nutballs last gasp. If RedHat, Novell, and IBM said no to the GPLv3 and Linus backed them with the kernel the fork would keep the GPL2 going. The sad thing is stallman is going to obsolete him self (more than he already is) over nothing but DRM and Tivo.
I personally dont like what Tivo did but hey, its their hardware!
The point is that if they do this, the projects will fork if the licence is whacked.
I agree with the rest of your post. FSF is going to screw themselves if they insist on putting out a license that the vast majority of programmers/companies can't support.
Excellent post (#16). I've not heard of any other major components to Linux that use GPL other than the kernel not wanting to convert, are there others? The impression I get is the true "free software" believers that wrote much of that code are actually looking forward to cripling Linux from being used in DRM systems.