“There’s no real way Linus can “lose””.
Yes there is. As one developer put it to me, if all of the libraries are GPL 3, how long can Linus hold out and keep Linux v2? If Stallman convinces a majority of devs to pressure Torvalds (or even rebel against him), how long until he folds?
The kernel is standalone and doesn't link against any libraries (which are userland anyway and have no relation to the kernel license). I suspect you're confusing libraries with drivers or subsystems and the one "interesting" case that Linus has stated would make him consider GPL v3 might be Sun making ZFS GPL v3.
Realistically, it just isn't going to happen, because it can't without a substantial rewrite of the kernel. You must get the permission of all the copyright holders to change the license (which is GPL v2 only) and some of the developers are dead now.
I was in my own battle against Stallman over copyright assignment in XEmacs that was only about five years after the original code had been forked and found it impossible get consensus on FSF copyright assignment. So I gave up. XEmacs was still GPL which suited me fine.
Linus will find it just as impossible to get consensus amongst all the contributors to change the license to GPL v3. Not only is it a longer timeframe, but there are vastly more contributors than I had to deal with.
The only reasonable path to a GPL v3 Linux kernel would be a massive rewrite along the lines of what happened when Gosling took his bat and ball and went home and made a proprietary fork of Emacs (Unipress Emacs). Arguably, the modern GNU Emacs that resulted was greatly improved by the process, but haven't we been criticized to death already for endlessly recoding the wheel?
Do you understand that Microsoft could conceivably release a GPL v3'ed Vista kernel long before Linus could release a legal GPL v3'ed Linux kernel? That's because they own all the copyrights (I presume) to their code and Linus doesn't as the portions of the Linux kernel are owned by their various authors and patchers.
If Stallman convinces a majority of devs to pressure Torvalds (or even rebel against him), how long until he folds?
It'll never happen. I could see Stallman turning Red Hat as they are known to drink from the FSF koolaid bowl but I think the kernel developers tied to Red Hat would sever their ties with Red Hat first.
GNU Hurd is vaporware after several decades of promises. Linus made all our dreams come true. I'm involved with Open Source software because I want a system all in source code that can never be taken away from me and that I can fix myself if there's a problem. Other developers are in it for their own reasons, but I am certain that only a tiny minority are in it to "beat Microsoft".