The issue is not gpl software the issue is what software does stallman own the copyright on and maintain.
They can of course "fork it", but then they are left with having to completely manage all those pieces themselves, and with the tiny income that free software provides these companies it may not be possible.
Yea there is no way IBM can afford to maintain the fork of software under gpl2 that stallman copyrights /sarcasm. Between IBM, RedHat, Novell, and HP there is more than enough cash out there for a 'gpl2 foundation'..
We'll see since that "free software" would suddenly get a lot more expensive. Only IBM and HP have anything resembling deep pockets, and both of those companies still sell Unix as their high end product.
True.
If Stallman really goes over the edge on GPL3, (it's possible he might realise the danger and back off- it's not final yet), I forsee many distributions advertizing themselves as GPL2. It might even be something Linus would do on his kernel builds. A 'uname -a' on my laptop reports "2.6.18-1.2200.fc5" for the kernel version. We could see it modified in the future to "2.6.18-1.2200.gpl2.fc5" so it would be easily identifiable by both humas and software.